I edited my list up top taking into consideration the good points you made.

Personally I think the whole web development forum is kind of a waste.. those forums should be integrated into other subjects..and I think we can all agree that design & flash are better dealt with on forums that specialize in just that.

Of course the mods will have the last word, but food for thought never hurts.

I'm against merging completely unrelated topics in an "optimization forum", as we might have people who know how to optimize SQL statements and index tables, and others who know how to optimize a ruby method. And other people might know how to reduce the session overhead and suggest a plugin that reduces ActiveRecord overhead. Noone will know everything, and merging such things results in a big mess - about the same mess as we currently have in our "Rails Programming" forum.

Having too general topic names leads to people posting in the 'big forum', simply because they don't really think twice where to put something. Which is why usually "general discussion" forums aren't perfect.

Also, please take a look at the "Rails Programming" forum. Many threads cover simple questions, which beginners might classify as 'optimization' (and should be posted in either rails core forums or 'app theory' ). Refactoring is usally something else, as it's about cleaning up code in specific methods (or models), plus reducing CPU usage.

Besides that, I strongly vote for a 'Ajax / Prototype / Scriptaculos / LowPro / Rails Helpers' forum - currently we have separate forums for JavaScript, XHTML etc, and where do people post all their Ajax stuff? In the Rails Programming forum - where it probably doesn't belong, especially as Ajax helpers are moved out of the Rails core with 2.0.

Finally, I wonder if it would be a good idea to have a forum for rails newbies. I remember when I started with Rails a few months ago, I wasn't even able to tell what is Rails and what is Ruby, and what ActiveRecord is. I probably would have preferred posting in a "New to Rails?" forum.

PS: I'd also like to vote against a "Tutorials" forum. Look what's inside: cPanel, acts_as_tree, updating several models from one form, Amazon S3, Refactoring, Installing Rails on Ubuntu,... - probably many of these threads are interesting, but you'd never look for them in that forum. I think its better to move the tutorials to the relevant forums and have *one* sticky in each forum with a list of topics that are tutorial-esque.

News and Articles
- Forum News

Starting Out
- Installing & Configuring Rails
- Tools

Planning
- Application Theory & Design
- Database Design
- Test Driven Development

Rails Programming
- Model (ActiveRecord / ActiveResource)
- View (ActionView, Helpers & ActiveSupport)
- Controller (ActionController / REST / Routes)
- RJS, AJAX & Javascript
- ActionMailer

Extending Rails
- Plugin Usage & Development
- Ruby Programming
- Automation (Rake Tasks, DRB, etc)

Production
- Deployment
- Benchmarking & Caching
- Refactoring
- SQL Optimization

Discussion
- General
- Forum Support & Suggestions

The biggest problem of the forum structure IMHO is having >75% of all posts in one forum. I'd therefor suggest to merge some underused forums and find a solution for splitting the 'Rails Programming' forum (e.g. ActiveRecord, ActionView,...). Having too many forums can be a problem...

The other problem I'm seeing with the optimization forum (even though I've learned more by looking at how people refactor stuff than anything else) is that optimizing a SQL table has nothing to do with configuring environment.rb or profiling a ruby code snippet.

A first suggestion is the following setup (which definetly can be optimized):

- Rails Core Programming
   - ActionController
   - ActionView
   - ActionMailer
   - ActiveRecord
   - Active Support
- Rails Related
   - Rails Installation
   - Rails Deployment
   - Application Design
   - Rails Plugins
   - Rails Optimization
   - Rails Testing
   - Database design
   - Ruby Programming
- Web Development
   - Tools
   - Ajax
   - Design

Those guys are my heroes

It would be sort of like http://www.therailsway.com/ but as a forum... and without Jamis and Michael. *shifty eyes*

It could be sitting pretty right underneath the Deployment forum.

I think it would rock