Forum Post: Site updates (on the main site) and forum upgrades are sorely needed

It took me quite a while to find your initial press release and proposed demands list, because your forum system is a giant "here's every thread made ever", and those at this point have been shoved way down the topic list.

If I wasn't a regular user of other forum sites AND curious as to whether what I was reading about the group in the news was at all accurate, I probably wouldn't have found this stuff at all.

I can understand never deleting posts as that goes against both the leaderless ideal and the voice of the people one, but I would suggest the following:

1. Use the front page of your site for more than just pictures of the protests. That press release should definitely be on there, and should probably be the first thing you see. Basically, if it's something the group has collectively agreed on as part of either their platform or action, it should be accessible without digging through the forums.
2. Get categories on your forums. Perhaps something like "Policy discussion", "Protest Planning", "General Discussion", "Countering Media Spin", etc. This would make it much easier to facilitate discussion, as well as much easier for people to see if there's already a topic made for something they want to discuss.
3. Appoint moderators in a minimal role. Basically: -Never delete anything -Lock threads only if they're exact duplicates -Merge threads with the exact same topic when it can be done without breaking the flow -File everything into the correct category If there's a concern about people mis-using even this level of power, make all moderation actions logged and publicly viewable so moderator abuse is plainly visible.
4. Add a bit of code to auto-discard duplicate posts in a thread. This is the one thing that should be deleted.
5. For the really critical discussions, use forum stickies. If you're trying to get the whole group to join (or vote on the results of) a discussion, they need to actually see it. You can't expect everyone to read every thread that ever gets made.
6. This one's minor, but the user account for the movement itself still has Lorem Ipsum placeholder text for its profile. I'd suggest a one paragraph summary of the movement, with links to the most important threads.

Leaderless != Aimless - if people can't quickly figure out what the goal is and what's currently being done to achieve it from the group's own website, then not only is this turning potential members away, but it's writing the media a blank check to distort the group into whatever they want it to be... which is already being attempted (see that CNN smear video for the most obvious example of this).

This group has a ton of potential, but it needs to develop a clearly visible focus ASAP or the media will bury it before it takes off.