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  • AADD Moderators: swilow | Vagabond696

News A review of Regional Forums - We want YOUR input.

TheLoveBandit

Indefinite break from BL - contact other admin
Joined
Feb 22, 2000
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To our valued members of the regional discussion forums, we bring news.

In an effort to keep the site overall healthy and robust, we periodically review its content for adding, merging, or removing forums based on the traffic levels and if content warrants such actions. In looking back at your forum's traffic over the recent years, it is no longer feasible to maintain the regional forums as they are, given the low level of traffic they generate.

While we fully appreciate this may come across as shutting down your 'home' forums, we assure you that we are open to exploring alternatives. We also have looked deeper and recognize the vast majority of you remain very engaged with the other forums across the site. We appreciate your presence and trust you'll stick with us regardless of the outcome on this situation. This decision is not being reached quickly (BL TIME!) or easily (you are ALL part of our community), but it is undeniable that something must be done.

The main driving factor is a general lack of traffic. There just isn't enough to justify maintaining three forums as separate entities. For your reference:

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With that, we aren't coming in and turning off the lights and locking the doors. We wanted to leave this thread (in each of the regional forums) for the members to have advance notice and to open the discussion to its members to offer any alternatives to simply (worst case scenario) locking these and moving them to the archive section. This can then be reversed if/when the site's overall traffic increases and the need arises once again for regional specific forums. As we stated - YOU are part of our community, as such we want you to have a say in what happens, especially to your 'home' forums. We are open to any and all ideas and suggestions.

One alternative that has been floated around is to merge these three subforums into a new 'Regional Social & Drug Discussion' forum (as was recently done with the Mental Health/Dark Side and E&C/LAVA subforums). Each region would have its own prefix, and all currently existing threads would be moved into the new subforum.

We will leave this open for two weeks, as we are very open to any thoughts, ideas, or discussion on options of what we can do. After this time, we'll review your feedback and see if we can come to a better alternative, so now is your chance to speak up on these regional forums. You can reply to this thread, we want your thoughts in the mix - so others can discuss and add their thoughts to yours.
 
Personally AusDD was my first bl forum and it will be strange without it as stand alone… but I now know how to set up a link to view only posts with specific prefixes, so can actually do that to see only Australian threads in a new merged regional subforum. Maybe a lot of ppl don’t know that’s possible.
 
There's a lot of resistance in the EADD forum. Something about retaining the culture/connection of the group, and I can understand that. My other reservation is whether new people will understand where to go for regionally specific issues if we merge. Just thoughts to consider.
 
There's a lot of resistance in the EADD forum. Something about retaining the culture/connection of the group, and I can understand that. My other reservation is whether new people will understand where to go for regionally specific issues if we merge. Just thoughts to consider.
A bold and concise name for such a forum would be the way to go. ‘Drug Use and Harm Reduction Resources By Location’ is what rattles off the top of my head. It’s dry but it’s clear. Someone could spice it up a bit.

What if each subforum had a little logo to the left of its name in the forum index? A world map with some paraphernalia or something drug related in the logo like the Bluelight pill could also make it work. A larger font to accommodate the images and to embolden each forums title might be helpful. A lot of sites use a very large presentation, which can be lame, but a happy medium might be a nice design change.

Maybe something in the newsfeed or a short section in the site to present geographic articles and links to some of the best threads by locale would encourage some traffic. Once the social media project is more on flow, a dedicated day for a geographic post would actually be great. ‘Bluelight Around The World On A Tuesday’ or the likes. The scheduling for a dedicated days of week style posting schedule never took off although you clearly wanted this at one point. It is a social media strategy that’s widely used.
 
Hi everyone. I’m surprised there’s be zero responses to this suggested change. Even from the moderators? @andyturbo @Vagabond696
I haven't been on here for reasons of my own but am back now.

I think I have actually changed my mind about this. It was sad watching Aus social die, and aus events die..now all that's left is ADD.. is it really that big a deal leaving it Regardless of low traffic?

One thing I do when ever coming across new forums is straight away look to see where the Australia area is. It's become habit and will be weird not having that anymore.

If it really is having a negative effect on Administration overall than I will support the change. But I dont really support it if low traffic is the main reason. (Assuming theres not extra difficulties for Administrators which I wouldnt know about)

How about others? Thoughts?
 
Personally AusDD was my first bl forum and it will be strange without it as stand alone… but I now know how to set up a link to view only posts with specific prefixes, so can actually do that to see only Australian threads in a new merged regional subforum. Maybe a lot of ppl don’t know that’s possible.
Thats good to know. Very good.
 
To give some context, if we have a problem user, someone who needs moderator attention quickly to manage - and we have an understaffed forum - then the issue may not be quickly resolved.
So in a merged regional issues forum, the larger group of moderators can deal with threads from all regions. Rather than potentially issues being not attended to quickly.
So that’s one reason to merge.

I see both sides to this for sure.
 
Whatever you do, please keep the banner in NSADD. It never made it over. When moving the whole collections over from one forum to the next and then renaming the remainder, make sure the remainder is NSADD. It's a simple plan to pull off.
 
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