Dorian, people post on this board (and on the much-missed General TravelTalk board) because that's where the traffic is.

It doesn't do good to have 40 other boards if hardly anyone uses them.

It's the network effect, and it's the reason why eBay has an unassailable lead in on line auctions, because the value of a forum increases as the square of the number of participants.

I think FT needs to be designed to be all on one page. You could fold the little-used airline FF programs onto another page, and put all the relevant forums on the home page for FlyerTalk. If a forum isn't getting enough traffic, fold it in to other forums.

You are right that once a forum gets too busy it can be split, but it should never be split more than once, then some time should go by to see how it is working. It should never be split up into a lot of forums at once because chances are that none of those forums will reach critical mass to be meaningful.