Forum Balance...General thread vs specialised threads

[Scott Ames]

I have a forum in a niche and I struggle to get the proper balance of specialized (that spelling is for you brits ) threads vs the General thread.

When I had only one topic.. the General one, the forum looked small. People wanted a topic for this for that and I gave them what they wanted. The problem is that most people want to post in the General thread and are lazy or not motivated to post in the other threads. General gets the bulk of posts, the rest very few.

I continually have to move posts to the proper threads. Its only natural to want to post where the most eyes are, or to be lazy and just post.

Have a lot of topics makes the forum look impressive, but the low post count on those other than General.

I'm thinking that the General thread should be a catch all and the topics should be filters of the catch all thread. I don't know of any forum software that does this, but to me it sort of makes sense.

In other words... the General thread has everything like Baking, Roasting, Cooking, BBQ etc. Any topic is fine, then when someone clicks on the BBQ topic, its a filter to show all the posts tagged BBQ.

Does this sound reasonable or is it problematic?