Originally Posted by
ClueByFour
I've said before (and did not get elected on this premise) that there ought to be a standardized process with benchmarks and milestones and a (for Spiff) newly added "if you post-pad to get the forum we'll never vote for it" clause. That way, it removes a bunch of the "personal" factors from forum creation (I suspect this very crutch is why we'll never see a process--it effectively removes power from the Talkboard and returns it to the people--can't have that!).
I've been doing some (very limited by time) data crunching. Some interesting results - did you know that airline forums from countries where english is not the language have statistically fewer posts per thread than airlines with english as a first language and that BA is the most garrulous airline forum on FT?
But there is no obvious easy metric/benchmark/standard to distinguish between forums which should exist and which shouldn't - at least when considering currently existing airline forums. Now, I still have to post some of the data I've gathered into the private forum, and I still have to do some analysis of the other forums... that's a wet weekend job however, since it involves working out in each forum, how many threads for each airline in the past year.
But there is nothing jumping out at me, so I probably need to start looking at multivariate models, and I loathe multivariate models and modelling with a passion.
So it is being looked at - but it's a pretty long slow job and likely to become more slow as we move off into areas which I frankly hate, and am not as confident about as other areas of statistics.