I agree with just about everything William says above. Also, if members added the most appropriate regional forum or fora to their MyFlyerTalk page and bookmarked MyFlyerTalk, they might be more inclined to click the link to the regional forum.

Rather than rearranging the fora, could an announcement be placed on FT for 2 weeks or so: "Have you checked the forum for your region lately? Click here for a list."? And maybe add an obvious link for the same period to add it to MyFlyerTalk. Watch traffic before, during, and after the announcement to see if visitations to these fora increase and stay that way.

I, for one, use the regional fora. I only check out the ones that I have some expertise in (to potentially answer others' questions), or ones that I need info about.

And sometimes those questions that I answer (or learn from others' answers) are transferred there from airline or hotel fora that I would never check. So I would support the existing policy.

My 2 cents, one of which is a wheat penny.

Just catching up here. Count me as another believer in the idea that things should go into the most appropriate forum for the topic. I think some of the most common "offenses" are actually dining threads that are started in Omni. Travel threads in Omni seem particularly problematic, since Omni is closed to some newer members.

One idea I do have - even if it is decided to allow "off-topic" discussions for the purpose of greater initial visibility, once the discussion dies down (time since last post; page 3 of the forum; something like that), could we then move the thread to the appropriate forum for better searchability? If I'm wanting to find the best seafood in Boston, I'll search DiningBuzz and New England. I'd hate to have to search everything just because the recommendations might happen to be in the Delta forum.