I don't like the sub-fora, but I don't think that's the problem.  Stefan identified the problem in another thread.  The reason that activity has declined is because people don't post moves.   

I think it was @Gorath in a post before that suggested "Standard practice when forums have less activity than expected is closing all slow sub-forums" so I took it for granted he was right as most of his post made pretty good sense to me.

If that is not the case then I stand corrected....

From a personal point of view I used to post quite often on various openings but somehow dont anymore, and I think part of the reason is that I have to stop and think which sub forum I should be posting in. Which for the number of posts going on should not really be required. It sounds silly but thats modern life, those seconds of your life will be lost and meanwhile you've turned on the news.

I think the point is to increase traffic, it seems there are personal preferences both ways, but surely thats the most important?

I haven't commented on this because I don't have a strong opinion about it either way. There are both advantages and disadvantages to the subforums.

I liked ChessPub the way it was, and I still like it the way it is now!

Quote:

I totally agree. You just beat me to it.

Doesn't sound like "a big job" to me, but I'm also rather lost as to what that would be supposed to accomplish. 
You can see on the mainpage which subforum has new posts, and it's not like the added subforums are cluttering something (like eg Channels in a Discord server do).

I rather like it the way it is currently - I can see that there are new posts in "Anti-Sicilians", but I can also see that those new posts are in "Morra" and "2 c3", neither of which interest me - if the subforums were removed, I'd have to click into "Anti-Sicilians", to see whether there is some discussion on my trusty Bb5 going on.

Personally, I 99% lurk, because I don't feel like I'm any good enough to post much of value anywhere (and if, then in various "General Chess" threads, not in the Theory hubs) - if someone has ideas as to what even a bad player can bring to the table, I'll gladly post more, but as of now I don't really see what I could offer this community.

The forum really has little activity this year. Standard practice when forums have less activity than expected is closing all slow sub-forums. Moving their threads to the appropriate mother-forums concentrates the activity on a few select places.
ChessPub might be already beyond the point at which this is still helpful, though.

Paying your authors to post in the forum would be a waste of money, IMHO.

If it were my show, I would 
(a) kill the vast majority of the sub-forums
(b) make sure the search funktion is state of the art, which has always been an issue at ChessPub.
(c) develop a long-term strategy to create traffic via Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, etc. I'm pretty sure this can be done for cheap, if you plan it carefully enough. Targets could be: enhancing visibility, driving traffic, sharpening the Chess Publishing brand as the go-to place for up-to-date opening theory, marketing (-> identify the 10 biggest chess YouTubers and give them a full access for 6 months in exchange for a review; of course one after the other), or for example encouraging people to interact in the forum. That's a painfully slow process, but with meaningfull activity 2 times a week on the biggest social sites, it could make things better and sell a couple of subscriptions along the way.   
(d) talk to all the big chess playing sites about creating a partner program, assuming it's not in place already. If the pie gets bigger, it's okay if others get a piece too.