SkiAdcock

In the past when Talkboard existed, when changes to forums were considered or up for votes by TB, there was a public announcement to give FTers a heads-up & ask for their input before final voting/decisions.

The CommunityDirector does a great job in considering ideas that could benefit FT.

Perhaps doing sitewide announcements on potential forum changes or forum creation could be implemented again by her, so she can potentially garner more input/have things brought up that she might not have considered.

Cheers.

TWA884

Those consolidations were done in part to shore up the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest forums which were not very active. The California and the West forums were holding their own.

glg

That logic is just backwards. You shouldn't look at the regions as needing "help". If you want to go with regions, just go with regions. Instead what you've done is made it look ridiculous with a handful of very arbitrarily chosen cities having their own forums. If it was just NYC and LA as the country's two largest cities, fine. But leaving SF and LV makes no sense.

LostInAmerica

For me, lumping Chicago into the Midwest forum clutters it up. I usually don't care about Chicago, but occasionally check the Midwest forum for useful threads or where I might have an answer. If I have to sort through Chicago to find the relevant non-Chicago posts I will probably find it is not worth the trouble.

jerry a. laska

I agree with glg, just because the Midwest forum isn't that popular doesn't mean taking the active Chicago subforum and lumping into the Midwest is the solution.

"The Midwest forum isn't really working well. How do we fix that? Ideas anyone?"
"Well, Chicago is part of the Midwest, Why don't we shut down the Chicago forum, it's pretty popular."
"Great idea, put all those Chicago posts in the Midwest forum and people will think the Midwest forum is a really happening place and they'll start posting about the great time they had in Akron three years ago!"
"I like it!"

JDiver

Suggestions are welcome, and crucial input for the Community Director.

Snark and sarcasm, however, are never useful and don't fit in with the spirit (and Rules) of FlyerTalk and this forum.

Mutual respect is the goal. Thank you for helping us achieve that.

Also note that the Rules and guidelines do not allow discussion of Moderator actions (even if putative) unless a forum's Moderators expressly request them.

JDiver & cblaisd, Co-Moderators

GUWonder

BUF is part of NY, and NY is a Mid-Atlantic state. BUF is considered part of the Mid-Atlantic region, a regional classification system that historically remains state-based.

In terms of the FT destination forum re-organization and attempted populating of that part of FT -- an effort that seems to have started in fits and starts even before this thread was started -- I have some doubts about the consistency of approach, the value of the consistency/inconsistency, and under which conditions the consistency is a good or bad thing for FT members in the main. My usual motto is "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". I am not sure how broken the destination forums are/were say two years ago, but I do know that some reorganization efforts don't really work out all that well in improving the time to seek and/or get the (quality) communication desired.

Personally, I'd prefer a Chicago forum on its own still. Probably the same for the DC/Baltimore forum. As it is now, it looks like the Mid-Atlantic forum is overwhelmingly dominated by DC area discussions, and the other "Mid-Atlantic" stuff is a drop in the bucket.

I don't consider "sleepy" forums to necessarily be a sign of a broken forum in desperate need for being given a helping hand up by more active discussions of a different sort.

cblaisd

It was a bit startling to find a post immediately after our previous note and which ignored that note. That post has been deleted.

Once more: discussion of moderator actions should take place directly with the moderators in question or with the Community Director.

Thank you,

JDiver & cblaisd, Co-Moderators

chgoeditor

As a regular reader of the Chicago forum -- and as an editor and person who occasionally dabbles in UX/UI -- I'd also argue against the inconsistency in forum organization.

It appears as if the most active city forums fairly closely aligned with those that have the largest tourism numbers annually. To lump some in with regions while segmenting out others does not make sense from a user experience perspective (particularly since foreign visitors are less likely to know what region of the country a specific city is associated with).

I'd also argue that from an external perspective, I cannot understand the need to boost a less active forum by rolling it into a more active forum. Alaska, for example, has as many active forums as the previous Midwest forum, but it still stands alone. Adding Midwest posts to the Chicago forum is unlikely to change the number of non-Midwest threads.

LtKernelPanic

A big +1 to this especially when it comes to the creation. deletion, or merging of forums.

While I usually go to the Midwest forum looking for info on Chicago and not other Midwestern cities I don't want to wade through a bunch of non-Chicago stuff. I'm sure there are others who visit the forum for the opposite reason.

gretchendz

Please give us our own forum back

We'll promise to post more

chgoeditor

Some additional tweaking may be required. Just clicked on the "Americas" link in the destination thread, and this incomplete list appears.

cestmoi123

This is a bit confusing - the original structure adds up to 240 topics, while the revised has 287. Where did the additional 47 topics come from? On a separate point, looking at the activity levels, this would seem a more reasonable list to me, if we're going to keep multiple city forums:

USA 21

Cities
NYC 40
DC 15
Chicago 15
Las Vegas 15
LA 15

States
California (ex-LA) 24
Hawaii 23
Florida 17

Regions
New England & Mid-Atlantic (ex-NYC and DC) 16
South, Midwest, and West (ex-Florida, California, LV, and Chicago) 36