Honestly, I completely agree with you about the dev forum. The problem is finding responsible mods to handle it all without letting the power get to their heads. You can see the issues I'm having with my in-game mods. I was gone for a week on business and look at all the rucus that was stirred up.
I think the concept that you're working on sounds neat. While I don't really like that the forums are splitting up, it's not in my role to do anything about that. Back in the HG days, we had nmebase forums, specfreq forums and hg forums on top of the many smaller ones and it was ok. Right now I dont think our population supports it, but it's all good. Anything that can help the community is good.
If you want, you can take over the dev forums here and do as you please with them. I can give you access to the game MySQL database (it would be a read-only account) and we can work on getting each dev the same type of access so they can access the data raw. I've actually written some tools for our mods that let them pull up banhistory, mod command history and other stuff. An example of that is the stats tool that I wrote for the players.
Unfortunately, I'm not comfortable giving that access outside the freeinfantry.* domain listings. I apologize for that, but I dont want to risk the integrity of the data and with things on my servers I know that they'll stay relatively secure.
I'm going to upgrade our forums to PHPBB3 tonight and once I do, I'll set up the private forum for your zone with that group listing. That will give me the ability to have unlimited sub-forums as well.
Also, you don't have to worry about me thinking you're going for power or any of that nonsense. This game isn't about some kind of power struggle or anything like that. If someone better then me can run the community, then by all means let them step up and show me. This game is about us having fun in a game we like. My role here is to keep the community intact and fun and provide a place for people to be creative. As you can tell, I have a ton of things and sometimes others slide off my plate. That's why I kinda try to encourage people to actually get involved with the game alongside playing. It takes things off my shoulders so I can focus on other areas and it's actually pretty fun. WZA:UC was just an idea I had. I passed it onto STAS and Ryan and with their help, we were able to make it one of, if not the most innovative zone to grace the Infantry history. We've done things with LUA, Vehicles, Items and others that were never done before and we made them work. All of that, just because I wanted to do more then just play. I'm sure there are other creative people out there and if you can create an environment that helps them flourish, then by all means go right ahead.
Roy