Don't want to upset anyone but I have to be honest and say the navigation and grouping of the forums is abysmal. It's really, really bad and some one needs to do something about it.
First of all on the homepage of the RSPB main site it's not even obvious there are any forums on the site at all. If you're a first time visitor and that's what you want you won't find any mention of forums anywhere. If scour the page really thoroughly in a detective like manner you might find the icon with 'Community' near the bottom of the page. Click that and you get to the community home page and you see the latest forum posts so it's obvious a forum actually exists. If you're used to internet forums AND you happen to spot the small print under the topic headings you'll probably figure out there are a number of different sub-forums as is the norm. So where is the complete list of all sub-forums? And how does one post a new topic? The answer to such questions should be obvious but it takes more detective work to figure out the latter and a good dose of luck to find the former.
After somehow stumbling on the web site feedback forum I found another post about this and someone fortunately posted a link to the Forum Map. Without this I couldn't have foud the web site feedback forum again. This is very handy but this should be arguably be either the home page of the community section or at least as a top level link from there. Instead it's a reply to a thread tucked away in the web site feedback forum that most people will never see.
The top level navigation is totally confusing too. Navigation titles should be short and unambiguous. Well unless you know what to expect the title of 'Wildlife' tells you nothing. That pretty much covers the whole of what the RSPB is about plus non-birds as well. I suppose one could make an intelligent guess here and assume this means non-avian wildlife. But that would be wrong. If you click it you get more 'latest blog posts' and more 'latest forums' and again if you scour the page you might see the tab for forums. Click that and lo and behold,, at last a complete list of all the forums here. Except you'd be wrong again. That's not a complete list.
Click on NEW POST and you get a drop down list or 8 of the forums and a little message at the bottom saying 'and 2 more'. How you get to post to these extra 2 isn't explained and anyway the fact is there are 4 more on the list to the left and an untold number of forums tucked away somewhere else.
Another confusing menu heading is 'CHAT'. Chat on the internet usually means IRC or Internet Relay Chat or something similar. If that's how a user interprets that he/she won't click on it and won't see the extra forums here. And 'Chat' here doesn't mean IRC at all. It's simply a list of more forums that don't seem to fit anywhere else. As such 'CHAT' is used to mean 'forums' or perhaps 'other forums' which is about as undescriptive as you can get.
It's unorthodox to separate the lists of forums in this way in any case. And it's difficult even when/if you get the hang of the overall plan you won't be able to find the specific forum you want unless you can memorize which main heading it falls under. And having to memorize lists of headings to use a web site is a sure sign of poor design.
I could go on but the point is the navigation is abysmal. I don't say that as someone who rarely uses the internet. I use it a lot and have even worked in web design.
On a more positive note many other aspects of the site are excellent. The visual look of the site is excellent and once you find the forum you want posting text, photos etc is all very easy. The potential is here for a great resource but currently I think it's seriously let down by this one aspect: navigation. As it's implemented at the moment one can only guess at how many potential visitors are being lost.
A second and unrelated problem is site speed. It's OK but it's definitely quite a slow site and would be better on faster servers.
By the way this is not a request for help in getting round the site. It's really to say the aspects outlined above need changing. Regular users might not have a problem with it but the test of site usability is first time users not those who have spent time learning the specifics of a site's navigation.
Yep totally agree with this Articuno. An example of such a forum is:
http://stargazerslounge.com/
But of course almost all other forums use this design. Personally I don't mind something that's different as long as different doesn't mean difficult. The problem with this one is simply that it takes you a lot more clicks to get where you want to go - even if you have learned where everything is.
Most forums are usually based on a software package. I don't know if this is a modified piece of software or has been built from the ground up (which would seem a strange thing to do, not least because of all the work). It doesn't seem to have any name that I can see but if it is a software package it might be fairly straightforward to revert to some more standardized format.