The overall idea, of having a few rooms or categories or whatever, devoted to broad topics or goals, seems fine to me.
Risks/costs:
- Risk of siloing, with community existing as a few separate communities.
- Risk of unreasonable demands on moderators
Comment on those risks/costs:
- For me personally, both are already challenges at PS, since posters can and do choose particular topics to discuss and moderators already have a big job after the recent decision to subject some threads to active moderation.
- The siloing thing is for me a huge risk and would undermine what I take to be the mission of PS. More below.
Benefits:
A bit more organization will help people find information or discussions of interest.
Moderation strategies/policies/norms might get clearer and this might make the job less onerous.
Big big big challenge:
Defining and protecting the mission of the whole thing.
The proposal in the OP is not about Peaceful Science. That proposal seeks to organize the whole community based on religion, and the proposal gives the impression (to me) that theological discussions are a huge goal of the forum. Like at least one other commenter here (@NLENTS), such a forum would be of no interest to me. I think we can use the proposal as a springboard for discussion and redesign, but also to ask ourselves whether the ‘Science’ in Peaceful Science is central to the goal(s) of the forum.
There is no right answer to the question. We might not even really know who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ want. So my comments above are not about whether the proposal above is ‘right’ or even ‘good’ but whether ‘we’ ever wanted to put time and effort (and emotional resources) into a discussion board about theism and theology.