I'd prefer to leave them the way they are. For instance - the Avis forum doesn't get too much use. I rarely visit it, but once in a while I'll want to see what's been going on, so I'll go and list the topics that have been active over the past 30 days to see if I missed anything.

If we were to combine all of the car rental companies into one forum, then I'd have to sift through lots of topics about National and Hertz that I'm not interested in.

While this may improve speed, I rarely have any speed issues. So, on that basis, I don't think it's warranted.

On your other point of making the new forums more active - I don't see this as a benefit. Packing a bunch of forums into one will make the newly combine forum seem to have more activity - but I doubt it would draw more people. I'm still only going to be interested in what Avis is doing, so having the little yellow bulb be on every time someone posts something about Hertz would annoy me. That would add an extra step of me clicking on the forum, only to find out that the new posts aren't of interest to me.

d