There are those who are of the opinion that if there are only a few forums to post in, then all topics will be funneled into those few forums regardless of what they are, and they will grow fat and large and productive. That also means with more activity comes more page-turning of the forum index to find a thread that's only a week old. So that's one school of thought.
The other school of thought is to make a plethora of forums, and categorize them appropriately, such that categories people may not be interested in can be hidden at will to shorten the main forum index page a bit. Something like this:
Yeah, that's roughly the old style in a nutshell.
- General
- General Discussion
- General Gaming
- New Members Forum
- Hot
- ASWGL
- GB
- Debate Room
- ZC
- ZC Beta
- Special Interest
- Archives
----------------------
Although if there is a focus on keeping the forum count low, there is still the option of just hiding the categories that a person doesn't want, or just grouping all non-ZC forums into one single category, though that denies a user the ability to hide a smaller group of forums they never utilize.
----------------------
Although ultimately, new ideas for new forums wouldn't be horrible. Although let's keep in mind that there is a balance between having one hundred empty forums and two horribly packed forums.
Also, if we add new forums in the future, we might have to sift out topics from the old forum to go into the new forum. It's a very tedious process, but it's not the worst thing to do.