In my experience, the regional and social forums are pretty good for discussing alcohol. There's threads about what you're drinking now, threads about craft beers and alcopops and spirits. Forum social threads often have booze talk, too. Alcohol is unique, culturally and in its form, which is primarily a tasty beverage, and so the way it's discussed will be different as well. Lots of BLers are smokers, but I don't think a tobacco forum is appropriate either. Can you see how the two are analogous? In terms of recovery and support and the darker side of booze, I think that TDS and all the forums (which have been overhauled pretty recently, by the way, and have had loads of new staff brought on, as a result of senior staff actively developing and reforming the site, something you seem to think doesn't happen)...the forums that cover sober living and that stuff are good, and I think that most people will agree that it's not your DOC that's the defining characteristic of a substance abuse problem. I think that recovering heroin addicts and ketamine heads and pill poppers have a lot in common with one another, and with alcoholics, too. To split that would be just another case of needlessly driving people apart when what we should be doing is gathering them together and pooling the wisdom of the collective. Before you splinter a forum, we need to move past thinking that it's obvious (or fair or sensible or whatever supposed abstract virtue) that a topic should have a dedicated forum, and consider what actual practical improvement we expect to gain, and at what cost.
Anyway, I'm going to channel alasdair and tell you to "be the change". Have you started any alcohol threads? What aspect do you want to discuss? I am confident you can find a place to talk about whatever it is, be it stories of wild benders, or cocktail recipes, or help with a problem. I guess you're a CD poster, the CD social used to be very busy when I modded it, I don't know if it is still that way. NSADDASASDAS, I imagine, has threads as well (I'm also guessing you're American here, I'm being very presumptuous), EADD definitely does and you'd be half-welcome at least, the lounge you could try if you can hack it, second opinion... I think that you will be able to either find what you're looking for, or create it yourself.
Sub-forums get created when there's so much talk about a drug that it warrants a whole forum to itself, and that results in two more focused and organised forums, but also two sufficiently busy forums. For instance, CD was split off from PD because there were so many cannabis threads (I'll try and find a list of what subforums BL has had over time, it's quite interesting to see how the architecture has developed). As it is, we're not swamped with alcohol threads, so we'd have nothing to populate the forum. The people who are talking about alcohol now are doing it with a group of posters they are acquainted and comfortable with in their "home forums". I think if you suddenly throw all those threads together into a new forum, you're probably going to put some people off, as they wanted to shoot the shit with their pals, not a bunch of strangers, and it could actually be counterproductive and lead to even less talk about booze.
[/$0.02]
EDIT: Found quite a lot of relevant reading. I'll just chuck it all here for you to have a look at.
Opinions Needed - Splitting Opiate Discussion Off From OD Into A New Forum- the poll results favour splitting OD, I think it's an intuition a lot of people have, but if you read the thread I think you'll see why it was decided then not to go ahead. Lots of people wanted it split, but I think you'll find that the people who have been here longest and as mods have a consensus in favour of conserving OD as it is.
RFD: Focus Forum and Drug Discussion groupings
Alcohol Forum? - Split from Heads Up thread
Thanks Staff Members- this one has a list of all the subforums ever at the top. It's not the thread I'm looking for, which has a chronology of all the splits, merges, creations and deletions. That thread does exist though, hopefully a staff member knows where.
EDIT #2:
History of Bluelight- not as detailed as I remember, but whoomp! there it is.