Is it time for a minor restructuring of our destination forums?
 

I’d like to invite our members into a discussion about our destination forums.

From my own observations, we have several vibrant destination forums while at the same time others are not performing quite so well.

The forums which are seeing low traffic figures I believe are contained in (but not limited to) the USA section such as Midwest, New England, Mid-Atlantic, Florida, and California. Conversely, the Asia forums do appear to be very healthy.

For example, do you have any thoughts on folding the city based child forums such as Orlando, NYC, Washington DC, Chicago, Las Vegas etc into their respective parent forums (Florida, Mid-Atlantic, Mid West, and West respectively). This idea has a few merits:

- boost traffic to the parent forum
- reduce the number of misplaced posts
- remove potential overlap, e.g.. road trips or itineraries covering cities as well as their surrounding state
- introduce greater consistency across the destinations portfolio. No other world region has city child forums.

Any downsides?

I stop by the Mid-Atlantic forum periodically. I enjoy that I don't have to sort through posts about Washington, DC or NYC.

No need to change, imo. "If it ain't broke...."

Several of the destination forums would get more traffic and threads if thread that are about the airports (not the airline) were moved from airline forums and into the correct destination forums.

Likewise threads in the hotel forums could be systematically cross referenced in their Wikiposts to the corresponding destination forums. At least initially, this would be labor intensive because the Wikiposts would need to be manually edited to include a reference and a link. However, the pool of members eligible to edit Wikiposts is large and the work could be spread over scores of individuals and managed from a temporary forum.

This could be done on a pilot program basis to see if it drives more traffic to some test destination forums, and then adopted, refined or abandoned based on evidence rather than conjecture.

Agreed. I've noticed this as well.

I also wonder why some general threads that evolve in airline-specific forums never end up in the destination, MR/premium deals, or other forums.

I don't think there's a need for this at this point. While some forums are quiet, I don't think moving them is going to boost traffic, nor do I think boosting traffic is necessary, the destination forums as a whole are not highly trafficked.

Plus, for some people who aren't from the US, it might be hard for them to know where to post. Those looking for New York might be confused and wonder if New England or Mid-Atlantic was right. Those looking for Chicago might not know to go to the Midwest etc.

I think most members hailing from outside the USA possess a pretty firm grasp of North American geography. If you were to start afresh and assign say half a dozen city sub forums, of all the cities on the planet which are the most talked about and which would you select?

FT has moved on from its humble US centric origin and now commands a solid global audience. Shouldn’t our destination section reflect this?

I'd be happy to review any such threads if you could point them out to me. Of course, the sames argument goes for USA related threads posted in DiningBuzz and Travel News ;). The USA forum could certainly benefit from the same attention other destination forums are given.

While not necessarily for or against this proposal, I want to point out that the idea of moving posts from city-specific forums into the broader regional forums wouldn't help the relatively low traffic in the New England forum, since none of those cities is in New England. But I'm okay either way on the proposal otherwise.

CMK10 mentioned that those not from the US might not know where certain places are, but isn't there a description of each region (with actual states listed) under the link to each forum?

Only if you look from the "Forums" page. If you just the drop down at the bottom of every page to go to a different forum (like I and I assume a lot of other FTers do), no.

I'm not understanding why this would be your purview if those threads are in forums where there are named moderators.

Here is a recent one from the Southwest forum. I flagged it a couple weeks ago:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/south...about-mdw.html

If the thread(s) you referred to reside in an unmoderated forum, I'd be happy to look at them. If the thread is in a moderated forum, please reach out to the mod team that looks after that forum.

Of course I have done so. But thank you.

Sure...for instance, get rid of the "antechamber," - that is, when I'm clicking on the Middle East/Africa fora on a non-mobile device, the next page is gratuitous: