Originally Posted by qfrodo

OK, you are asking for a demonstrated need, so I took a "snapshot", if you will, of the first page for the ONASAFFP forum. NOTE, I don't even fly LAN, just trying to provide what you are requesting. I don't even know what threshold needs to be met, or in what way it needs to be met to justify a need in your estimation. So here goes a non scientific "need" analysis.

First off, I discounted the sticky post, the Porter Airlines post that was started in Mar of 2006 (and has 1,158 posts and almost 100,000 views), and the post asking if there should be a LAN forum. (There was a second Porter post that had 5 replies and 866 views which numbers are included in the other figures given below)

That left 22 remaining posts. Of these, 8 had LAN in the title. I did not check to see if LAN was mentioned inside any others. This left 14 posts about other subjects. Using these figures, slightly over half the posts involved LAN.

Next, of the replies, other than for the discounted posts indicated earlier, there were a total of 93 replies on the 8 LAN posts. The 14 other posts had a total of 61 replies.

And finally, the views. For the 8 LAN posts, there were a total of 5,069 views while the 14 other posts had 4, 525 views.

So, where does this put one in terms of "need"? While the "snapshot" will change with every additional post, the one described here shows activity on LAN as being more than half, given the excluded posts mention. Does that meet a threshold for forum creation?

Regards