I was just thinking about this today actually! x) I agree that the forum is quite messy at the moment and could use some organization. I think we worry too much about having an active main forum (main forum being CBC, excluding the sub-forums), and that's why we group multiple types of threads in CBC. However, I don't think an active main forum is necessary, or is more important than organization. Take
Trade Corner for an example, it looks a great deal cleaner compared to CBC, despite the fact that their main forum isn't very active. The Trade Shops sub-forum still manages to garner activity even though it isn't part of the main forum. For the past few months, Anti and I have been discussing what should be focused on; what should be in the main forum (given the limelight). (We believed it was either discussion & RMTs (current format) or discussion & events.) Instead of putting the attention on one (or two) things, we should be concentrating on CBC as a whole (which is obvious of course). With that said, I don't think we should worry about the main forum being small or inactive. CBC's current state of inactivity shouldn't be used an excuse not to do this either. We won't get anything done if we just wait until activity picks up. We should be working on organizing CBC and figuring out what CBC should be ("What do we want in CBC?") before trying to make it active. It's like trying a make incomplete forum active without finishing the forum itself.
I think that this forum should be split up into different sub sections. Meaning that rate my team threads can go into one place while discussion threads about different aspects of the game can have its own section as well. Wifi / PO tournaments should probably have their own section as well as clans. I just think that changing the forum structure to make it more organized will have a positive impact on it.
I think what we need to do is simply make a Competitive Team Help sub-forum and direct all the competitive RMTs into that forum. By doing that, the forum would be much more cleaner, and would only include discussion, battle logs, and battling guides. The last two are rarely seen, so it would be mainly discussion.
T&E is also quite messy, with tournaments, leagues, clans, and whatnot being grouped together. I don't think sub-forums are required for it though; instead, requiring moderator approval before posting could return as a rule. We have a lot of unnecessary leagues that are practically the same, and mod approval would filter out some of those and direct the poster's efforts to already existing leagues.
Here's a rough draft of what the forum would look like: