Second time typing this up, damn power outage!
Okay... Trucla'spost got me thinking. Having sub-sub-forums for each type of game engine would probably bloat the main page, and stray from the realm of KiSS styling. That said, I can appreciate the fact that people would want to find games that run with their new software, like RAGS and such. I also saw something else in Trucla's post regarding the Game Creators section that I will address later in this post.
LRM'ssuggestion of having sub-threads for walkthroughs and hints in each game's own thread, is definitely an decent alternative to what I suggested for having a walkthrough forum. My only complaint about that, is that a moderator would have to set up the sub-thread for each new game discussion thread that was created. That is, if Aceboard is even capable of creating sub-threads.
That's not to say, someone wouldn't be posting a link to the walkthrough thread for a game using the walkthrough forum, but at least it would not have to be a moderator.
Which brings me to what I see as the inevitable, and unenviable, solution to the problem of "People asking for help/walkthroughs in the game discussion thread."
More Proactive Moderation
Right now, aside from removing spam posts, the moderators seem to be busy moving and deleting posts from newly created threads by people who don't know where they should be posting, or just don't know better. Unfortunately, with Aceboard, we don't seem to be able to limit a person's ability to create new threads, if they haven't reached a certain post count first.
The best we can hope for is to make the forums appear as simple and easy to understand as possible, especially since it's read by people from all over the world. That is why I suggested having a walkthrough forum, for all games, so people would know that is the first place they should go for a solution. It has its own problems, as obviously we can't complete a game as soon as it appears on our radar, and write up a complete guide for it. But keeping it open for everyone to contribute to, I feel is a good start.
I'm going to return to Trucla's post regarding having forums for each type of game. I would suggest instead of bloating the main page, keep all the games that aren't made by Shark together. But, with a little help from the moderators, in the "Other Sexy Games" forum start changing the topics of each thread, tagging them with what type of game they are. Tags such as [RAGS] [AIF] [FLASH] [EXE] etc, in front of the title of the game, would allow the search engine to help people find game types that they are looking for. For example: "School Dreams 3"would become "[AIF] School Dreams 3". "Sarah"would become "[HTML] Sarah". This could even be expanded further with more tags, "[AIF] School Dreams 3 - goblinboy" and "[HTML] VDG Sarah - Chaotic".
In essence applying a Manual of Styleto the forums.
Which brings me back to the [no]Creators' Corner[/no] Games Creators section of the forums. I absolutely believe that this section is an important addition to the Lagoon, and I do hope to see it grow as time goes on. Currently the "RAGS Games" forum doesn't see much activity, and I would like to see it merged with the "Other Sexy Games" forum as most of the topics in there aren't posted by the authors of those games. Those topics that are posted by the authors of those games could be moved to the "Projects" forum as they most likely were a work in progress at the time the thread was created.
I hope I was able to clearly explain my ideas; feel free to ask questions, fling insults, and question my sexuality!
EDIT: Forgot to add, by setting precedence with the tagging system hopefully other users would catch on to the system and start creating their threads using the same format.