DJGiZmO said:
I mean when they were getting more traffic in those forums they could justify it. Less traffic equal less administration... Does anyone understand my point? ... They can say its makes it easier to have one forum since the site is so customized... blah blah blah... Bull Stick... This site is based on a Php / Web based bulleten board. Vbulletin was not designed but the BL staff.
Less traffic means you have to wonder it it is worth keeping a forum. If there isn't so much of a demand for something, is it still as valuable? I'll not argue those of us who frequent here, sometimes exclusively in the events forums, find it extremely valuable. But to the site overall, it is a different perspective and gives different answers. By the nature of being an 'Events' forum, it ought to have high traffic or it ought to be discontinued. As far as size and management requirements, it still requires the same amount of administration (pruning and other Admin functions) as it did when it had high traffic. It may require less moderating since there are fewer threads - so then you ough to ask if you are overstaffed from a moderator point of view (and the mod count has dropped from 4 per region to 2 per region over the past few years). As for BL customization, you are pretty close to the mark. We never said it's easier since the site is so customized, but you are correct that there is as little as possible customization from the original software (admins don't want to have to re-write coding at every upgrade). So, that is not part of why we merged.
I believe this move was really done because of either database space or something related. Normal automated scheduled pruning can solve 99% of any of those issues. The BL staff just basically tripled their man hours for this issue until they can find a solution. Does that make sense? Nope.
Database space is a concern. Not that we're hitting capacity (to my knowledge), but for the fact that all the events forum combined contributed only 5% of the site's traffic, and yet they ate more than their share of the hard drive space. As for pruning...when was the last time you remember an events forum getting pruned? We ran one Dec 1, 2003 and one last week...before then it was YEARS. But again, you are correct, more frequent pruning can aid this, and we will be pruning more frequently. An automated prune would make some sense, but we want to archive certain things and a manual prune allows us to ensure specific threads are saved before pruning. As for tripling the man hours? Actually, I think this is taking less man hours than it used to - we have less time wasted cleaning up spam, misplaced threads, incoherent thread titles, etc. Additionally, rather than two mods checking a medium slow forum frequently (wasting time) you have the right proportion of mods/members and mods/threads so we are making better use of our moderators and their efforts. Does that make sense? Yep.
People come to BL for convenience. People come to BL for the LOCAL commuity factor. If that is taken away, then except for the midwest, there's no point of having an events forum for the N&S Americas.
Bluelight, listen to your posters...
We had problems with people cross posting events, trying to draw attendee's from other regions - problem solved. We had problems with the more 'community' oriented threads fitting within the context of an EVENT oriented forum. The discussions about an event (who is going, where to meetup, the afterparty and cracked out comments) all still have a place in the current threads, there was never an attempt to change the content of an event thread. However, we struggled to handle discussions on 'the local scene', visitor threads, and other non-event specific threads...now we have N&SAmerican SOCIAL which is a home to these discussions and a whole lot more. Some of these changes were required, like the merge - either merge or die, we chose to merge. Others have resulted from us trying to make the best of the situation (ie the thread title formatting...which, now you can sort the entire forum quickly and easily and know everything in your area). In the aftermath of the required changes, we made some decisions/policies to try and make the best of it, but we aren't stopping there - we're continuing to "listen to our posters" and improve the situation. In fact, you'll find a few more ANNOUNCEMENTS at the top of the forum asking for member input on what we
can do to make things better from here, so not only are we listening, we're
asking for your input.
============
DJLA - Trixiee is correct, we had to combine CAN+NE+SE+West+LatinAmerica, and we kept all the mods that we could (none were added other than physix who was a temp for me but proved invaluable and was kept as I got SuperMod'd), and we split them among N&SAmerican SOCIAL and N&SAmerican EVENTS trying to get a mod from each traditional region into each forum. That way, each region is still represented in the EVENTS forum, as well as having a mod who is familiar with members (and their trolling vs sense of humor) for the SOCIAL forum. As for your beloved MW, perhaps you've noticed the link at the top of this forum for the
MW Events sub-forum? Traffic for that region was heavy enough to require segregating it from this general population. It is pretty much the same as it used to be, but the slower states have been put in here, so MW now only looks at IL-IN-KY-MI-OH.
