I am pleased to offer for public consumption the same [slightly redacted] opinion that I expressed in the private TB forum:

Shouldn't we respect the will of previous talkboards by not having formal criteria or metrics but allowing each TB member to make the dertermination of when a new forum is called for for her/him self?

Ok, slightly snarky but still my point of view.

Besides, as has been said, creating formal criteria only begs posters to game whatever system we come up with.

A more fundimental question to me from Randy's post on the VX thread is about fragmentation.

I actually tend to agree with MSP that MYFlyertalk more or less mitigates whatever fragmentation issues we might have faced in the past. By way of confession, I am here in Jamaica with my sister who has been a flyertalker ever since I got her addicted a couple years ago and she was making fun of me a few days ago because I still had some of my regular forums under my IE 'favorites' rather than properly setting up MyFlyertalk. But the point is that either is, to me, an acceptable response to the concerns of fragmentation.

Years ago, I was one of the many people that Randy mentions who felt that flyertalk was becoming too fragmented. But my thinking has come 180 on that. At the time I got panicky because I couldnt possibly follow all of the threads on all of the forums as I did for the first three or four years of Flyertalk.

Since then I have learned to not worry about reading every single forum for fear of missing something.

But today my fear today is that I am missing something because there is not a specific place to talk about it and so people who might otherwise share information are simply not sharing it. To me that calls for MORE specialized forums, not fewer.

One perfect example is wharvey's renewed suggestion for a travel products forum. I didnt realize people were posting in all those different places about travel bags and products and the fact of the matter is that I am in the market for a new rolley so have actually been doing some looking. I missed quite a few otherwise helpful threads!!!

Anyway, perhaps we could engage in a bit of a philosophical discussion about what each of our own visions and criteria are about creating more forums and the issue of fragmentation specifically and see where that leads us?

As I say above my own feeling is that more specialization is BETTER at this point.

And as to new forum criteria, as I posted on the public forum:

My own personal criteria for creating a new forum are (in order of importance):

- a compelling case that the forum has potential for lots of use in the future.
- a cadre of flyertalkers passionate about the program.
- a 'decent' number of posts about the program (this threshold is pretty low to me since its hard to judge post counts for a forum that doesnt exist yet)

Hope this helps.