One of the drawbacks of having too many forums is excessive fragmentation. It's good to have a certain amount of cross-fertilization. Besides, if you narrow the forums too much, people don't post as often, and then eventually people don't post because they don't see others posting either. It's a viscious cycle.
One thing that we're missing from OpenACS.org that seemed to work at least passably well on web/db is the ability to assign different categories to threads in the same bboard. That way people could look in one unified place for recent activity but could also narrow their searches for existing threads to those that are likely to be relevant. if the new 4.5-based site will restore this capability, then perhaps we want to wait and consider which topics need their own boards and which ones simply need their own categories within a larger bboard.
