>>Have to say I agree with the above post, we go for days on this forum with no new posts, so I don't really think splitting by topic is necessary. If anything, it will probably reduce my usage of the board since I would have to check three places to see if there is anything new now.
It has nothing to do with encouraging more traffic or the slowness of the current forum. No one is being forced to use those subforums or being asked to. The subforums at this point in time simply provide a place to move OLD posts to so that they don't scroll off the board and into the archives as quickly. Once posts are in the archives it can be difficult to find information if you don't know how to word the queries. The subforums are for the time being going to provide organization of existing posts for those folks that want/need to find specific information quickly and don't want to hunt through a single forum containing everything or having to try to peck through the archives. Since most people never bother to go past page 1 it's ideal to move the older posts from page 2, 3, etc. Eventually more people will start to use these forums and the subforums will take on a life of their own, but for now it's a pseudo-archive system. 
Also, it is actually pretty easy to search all of the ferret forums. Just use the 'today's post' link and in the lower search box highlight 'ferrets'... the search will search the main ferret forum and all of the subforums attached to it. You can stipulate how far back in time you want to search too... the last time you logged in, 2nd to last time, last 24 hours or any time. Or if you would like to search all of the forums in the critter catagory (or rodent catagory) you can use the upper search box instead of the lower individual forum search box. The search results will bring up any threads that had new posts made to them after the time frame you specified.
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Wyvern