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  • NSADD Moderators: deficiT | Jen

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

TheLoveBandit

TheLoveBandit

Indefinite break from BL - contact other admin
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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.
 
There will be a few regions (or local areas more specifically, like major metro areas) that will likely account for a vast majority of the traffic, so if you can identify the major discussion hubs, and have a spot for those cities/areas and then have general discussion forum for everyone else.
 
A merger or total elimination would be the most likely solution. I don’t see any reason why Drug Culture can’t take on regional threads as well. The subforums for region here are basically drug culture per area anyway. That’s actually an idea I want to seriously put forth as the solution. Revise Drug Culture to be inclusive of area threads and botch these forums.

To accommodate traffic levels and attractiveness, The more concise Bluelight is with a more considerate amount (as in less) subforums, the better. There’s no reason why Drug Culture, and even Mental Health and Recovery can’t take on a more regional approach partially regarding culture and resources. That makes nothing but sense to me.
 
A new Harm Reduction subforum with allocation to regional stickies and discussion could be he hung to round out my proposed solution. It’s always, to me, been really odd to not have a pure Harm Reduction discussion board. All subforums being harm reduction, which you gave me as the answer to this before, doesn’t slice well to me. Should be built right into the banner ‘Bluelight - Harm Reduction, Support, And Drug Research Community’ or the like and a direct click to the Harm Reduction Board. From there a basic set of stickies for major resources per continent, international (e.g. INPUD and Geneva Conventions for example) and some specification to talk regional.

There’s a ton, a ton of discussion in harm reduction land as an entire movement is taking over the world which would give room to such a subforum. While one thing is happening in Vancouver, meanwhile a region in the USA is allocating harm reduction funding to law enforcement and expanding their prision to combat those nasty opioid users. True story. A forum like this to collect the best HR materials, and cover the movement itself is so obviously a good idea and I hope you consider my words. That’s how his site postures itself within the scope of the movement on site to co-incide with the last years Social Media expansion. I know personally how much of a voice this site has internationally and it’s a major bust to not have a dedicated sub for HR in those words.

That’s rebranding in a nutshell.
 
Joey said:
A merger or total elimination would be the most likely solution. I don’t see any reason why Drug Culture can’t take on regional threads as well. The subforums for region here are basically drug culture per area anyway. That’s actually an idea I want to seriously put forth as the solution. Revise Drug Culture to be inclusive of area threads and botch these forums.
Click to expand...
I personally had this idea as well and strongly agree with it, but I don’t think that most here would support that.

Merging the three into one new forum seems like the best compromise here.
 
More organized is less confusing. The over all traffic seems to average out and get many hits when combined.

Statistics seem to vary from year to year.

However, European & African Drug Discussion far exceeds all traffic combined.

Organization can help with directing towards threads and their specificity and would be much easier to locate in this category for demographic markers.

And in keeping these grouped together would seem to help quite a bit to identify these direct threads as well.
 
I vote to keep them separate. I mean, once we generate more traffic via the social media outreach we’re doing, you’d just have to separate them again, anyway 😎
 
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