goalie

It has been

SanDiego1K

Done.

Announcement

Dovster

Thank you!

CMK10

Looks like the description of the Special Interest Travel group needs to be updated on the forum page to include the new forum @:-)

SanDiego1K

Done. Appreciate the heads up.

CMK10

Of course, thank you for being so proactive on getting this forum up and running ^

tcook052

...nothing apparently as by my informal count only nine posts in the last month with the last one coming 6 days ago. The forum's biggest proponent hasn't posted in it for almost two months so it seems safe to say the forum has ground almost to a halt in under three months so at what point does TB take a step back and re-evaluate its decision to create this forum?

rwoman

Is it notably more/less traffic than the other similar forums? My approx count below is based on active threads in the past month.

Disability - 13
GLBT - 13
Religious - 6
Travel Health and Fitness - 7
Travel with Children - 7
Travel with Pets - 4
Women Travelers - 8

As these forums tend to fill a niche, based on your criteria, we should consider deleting all of them?

I think that would be a bad idea as they do satisfy various specific interests.

CMK10

A little early isn't it? I might also add that the forum's biggest proponent is currently suspended.

tcook052

Early? Do you think the metrics are going to improve in 3 more months? 6 months? A year? If so why?

Only recently and not for the preceding 6+ weeks.

Yes, I would. The constant refrain in lobbying for a smokers forum was that there wasn't anywhere else to host these discussions which at barely a post a week I think is proof that the opposite is true, that there are others places where these issues can be discussed.

Such is case with the Travel with Pets forum as at a quick glance there are a number of topics on the page one regarding specific airlines including as Aer Lingus, JAL, UA and JetBlue which could fit easily within the individual airline fora and may actually get better answers since more readers see them.

The paradox to me is to deny a SA airline forum citing not enough demand or expected traffic while creating special interest fora which are further from FT's core and then ignoring or exempting their low usage. I'd rather TB be consistent in its approach to forum creation and use the same yardstick for all possible fora.

That is of course just MHO and YMMV.

Canarsie

For what it is worth, I believe your humble opinion is valid...

...but I am of the type who would rather have concrete evidence in terms of being against the existence of a forum than just presuppose what could happen without ever giving it a shot. So far, we do have that with the smoking forum; however, I believe it is too early to judge it just yet...

...and I know, the other aforementioned forums have been around for years, why don’t we motion to close them, etcetera. I would consider the closure of those forums with little traffic; but I also agree with rwoman that those forums tend to fill a niche.

Although we could propose the motion ourselves, there is nothing stopping anyone from posting a discussion calling for the closure of any specific forum. Members of TalkBoard already voted to have at least eight forums closed within the past year, which has actually happened.

Dovster

As that proponent, I can give you very good reasons why I haven't posted in it: I haven't made any trips during that period so I neither needed information about smoking availability nor was I in a position to give information picked up on trips.

However, today I made reservations for a TLV-FCO-VCE trip. Although I had not seen your post, I started three threads -- one talking about a hotelin Venice I found which allows smoking, one asking about smoking in FCO and another asking about smoking in VCE.

tom911

Where are all the other members that were expected to start new threads here because they were discouraged from posting elsewhere on FT? That was the main selling point of this forum. Different rules were in place for this forum being created than others (there was no listing of threads in other forums to demonstrate demand, for instance - it was basically "build it and they will come" - and the Talk Board president cited this forum's creation as the Talk Board's greatest achievement of the year).

3 new threads so far in October (all by Dovster) - (would be ZERO if you didn't start those 3 today

2 new threads were started in September.

6 new threads were started in August.

Seems like it's getting slower rather than busier. Without your new threads today, we have 8 new threads the last 10 weeks, or less than one thread per week. Is that a mark of a successful forum?

We were told members were discouraged to post on hotel and airline forums. They seem to be discouraged to post in the new forum, too, looking at these numbers.

cblaisd

Just a thought....

While the use may clearly be lighter than some might have thought, on the other hand it's worth remembering -- from the evidence in more than one thread elsewhere -- that each of these threads in the Smoking Forum represent a thread that didn't have to happen and devolve in another forum (to the frustration of both posters and moderators alike).

I.e., the typical course of the typical threads in the Smoking Forum if they had been elsewhere would have gone like this:

• Does the the Excellentum Hotel in ________ have smoking rooms?
• Smoking is nasty.
• Please let me know when you'll be there, so I can avoid it.
• I just get a balcony room and smoke on the balcony.
• If I can't get a balcony room, I blow it out the window.
• You're a terrible cretinous excuse for a person
• [THREAD LOCKED]

There is a strict no flaming (pun intended) policy in the forum so such discussions don't happen. And they don't distract the posters and moderators in other forums now either because of this forum.

Secondly, I've never quite understood the one-size-fits all quantitative metric as the sole approach to justifying forums. It can be one criterion among others, it seems to me -- including ones like "Does this forum keep the other forums less sullied with threads that inevitably devolve?" or "Is there a niche need that can be filled by such a forum?" or "Is this a resource (with its strict moderation against off-topic flaming) that nobody else is offering?"

Dovster

I do, indeed, wish that more people posted there but the bigger question is are FTers being helped by it? I started those threads about 10 hours ago and each has 80-90 views. Another that I started a few months ago about PRG has 700 views.

The topics are not one which invite many responses. If I ask whether there is smoking allowed anywhere in CDG, all that is really needed is one reply saying if there is and, if so, where. Any other smoker who wants to find out merely has to do a search of the forum to see if the answer has been posted and, if not, then he can start the thread.

If even 20 FTers can get information they want by simply reading a thread -- much less 700 FTers -- it is serving a good purpose, even if the only post in it is the one which began it.