I plan to vote Yes on this motion tomorrow. The Budget, Dollar, and Thrifty forums are no longer needed, and merging them will improve FT.
In response to concerns that former Budget, Dollar, and Thrifty threads might be incompletely titled after a merge, I drafted the following statement of implementation preference, which the Community Director may consider as she wishes:
We would prefer that the threads moved from the closing Dollar, Budget, and Thrifty forums be identified somehow in the new General Rental Car Discussion forum. That identification could use tags like Hotel Reviews in the Luxury Hotels forum, it could be a prefix added to each thread title, or there could be some other way to identify the former home for these threads. If such identification is feasible within the next four months or so, we favor delaying the merge of threads from those three forums until the identification task is completed.
When I vote Yes, we will have 6 or more TalkBoard members on record in favor of this statement. It's like a friendly amendment but somewhat stronger because it will have 6 votes rather than some smaller number.
If TalkBoard had a formal friendly amendment process this could have and would have become an amendment to the motion. I am comfortable treating this as an informal recommendation accompanying our formal recommendation. In particular, I wouldn't really mind if the Community Director were to ignore it, but I think this informal recommendation addresses a valid concern that FT members, including TalkBoard's own MSPeconomist, have raised.
For what it's worth, I have already started the process of asking IB about different options to identify the former forum for any threads merged from Budget, Dollar, or Thrifty. Threads merged from Other Car Rental will not need any such identification. The four month time frame is a concession to the reality that Internet Brands always has other priority projects, coupled with a desire to get this done in a reasonable time frame with or without identification of old threads.