Originally Posted by lfw045
Personally I think it is redundant in a way......I mean that in a most respectful way. Isn't that what the Search feature is for?
Well, theoretically yes. A person should be able to find what they are looking for using the search.
But here is a thought experiment.
If we extend this line of thinking to the extreme, a question arises. Why do we need sections at all? Why not just dump all topics into one giant section? As a matter of fact, we can remove all sections at all and only leave the Recent Topics listing and the Search page.
For some people it would be OK. I'm sure there are users who only look at the recent topics list and don't wander off into the sections at all.
Yet, it's obvious that a message board without sections/categories/sub-forums (whatever they are called) wouldn't be a message board.
Now if we reverse it and go to the opposite extreme, we would have a home page with 1,000 sections in it, each one containing just a few topics.
As you can imagine, that wouldn't be good either.
So the idea with virtual sections is simply a way to combine the opposites.
As an added benefit, it would (hopefully) stimulate curiosity.
That's what I like about tag clouds. Just by looking at it, you might get interested in some narrow topic of which you weren't thinking just a minute ago.
With search, you would only find what you are already looking for. If you aren't already thinking about it, you won't find it.
Searching and browsing are two fundamentally different activities.