Welcome - Here is what's going on

TheLoveBandit

Retired Never Was, Coulda been wannabe
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Getting to the point ...
In keeping with the continuous evolution of Bluelight to best serve our members, we have merged the N&S American Events forums. Some of you may recall long ago when there was only a USA Events forum. Then, as the site grew, it became feasible to split the forum into regions, allowing a better focus on the needs of members in a specific area. However, over the past few years, the traffic in these forums has dropped considerably due to various reasons. One of the basic questions any forum has to be asked periodically is ‘If this forum didn’t exist, is there enough reason to create it’ and with that reasoning, several forums might have faced elimination. Instead, we chose to merge our regions back together into a more active forum.

One of the other things we chose to do during this reorganization is to split the traditional N&S American Events threads among two new forums:

N&S American EVENTS will be specifically about events. Our usual electronic events, as well as club weeklies, national tours, and such – but also to include art shows, film festivals, and whatever other events of relevance to our members. To begin with, we are restricting new threads from being posted. As this forum will now contain info for events anywhere in North OR South America we will be working out some formatting on our thread titles to increase the readability and searchability of the threads for members to find things in their area. For now, if a member would like to get an event posted – please add your info into the NEW EVENTS thread at the top of the forum and the moderators will split it out as a separate event once we have all the necessary information and can set up the thread title properly. We may, at some time in the future, open the forum back up to the members for creating initial posts, but for now members may only reply to existing threads. This will give us a chance to refine our guidelines and forum structure. You may notice that there is a MidWest Events sub-forum, which was created to prevent the MW threads from drowning out everyone else (they were by far the most active of the old regions). If another region has enough activity, we can create other sub-forums as needed. Likewise, if a sub-forum ever dies down enough, it may get merged back into the general events forum.

N&S American SOCIAL is to cover all the other threads, including those that were historically awkward for our events forums to handle. Here you’ll find our roll calls, our visitor/vacation threads, discussions on the scene in various cities, etc. We are still playing with the scope of this forum, so feel to create a thread on something you think would fit in there and have a purpose, especially if it is of local or regional relevance. Yes, that forum will still be wide open for any member to post OR reply. We certainly won’t try to do what other forums already cover – such as College&Universities, The Lounge, etc., so don’t be surprised if we have a few growing pains and threads get moved to other forums (or from other forums for that matter).

The final result will be N&S American Region having three main forums – Drug Discussion, Events, and Social. The Events section will have two sub-forums (for now) – MidWest Events and our Archive. Please take the time to read the guidelines in the new forums as some things have changed.

I’d like to close with a thank you to the staff involved in this change. Specifically, Catch-22 for doing the muscle work and putting this in place, and ALL of the events mods that helped shape the new structure. Our old events mods have been split to share the burden of the Events and Social forums, and they all are looking forward to helping create thriving forums with current and relevant information for our members. Thank you all for your help in making this happen. And finally, a thank you to the members, who remain patient through this adjustment period and help us to become a more relevant and efficient community.

- Reed, TLB of BL
 
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y merge north america events together

why did u merge all the north america events threads together. It was so much easier and more organized when all i had to do was click northeast to view events in ma. Now its everything in one forum and its more shit u have to filter through to find your areas events. do u know what im saying? is it going to go back to the way it was
 
congratulations people.

a social forum for ya's is a good idea.

social equality for all and it will clean up your events forum a bit :)
 
drgreenthumb00 said:
It was so much easier and more organized when all i had to do was click northeast to view events in ma. Now its everything in one forum and its more shit u have to filter through to find your areas events. do u know what im saying? is it going to go back to the way it was
Errr, no, it isn't going to go back to the way it was. Why would we have gone through all this trouble just to mess with your head temporarily. Granted, it'd be fun screwing with people, but that's not the point - the point is to make forums that are more active and less likely to be killed, so we merged them. As for 'more shit u have to filter through' I will say:
To begin with, we are restricting new threads from being posted. As this forum will now contain info for events anywhere in North OR South America we will be working out some formatting on our thread titles to increase the readability and searchability of the threads for members to find things in their area.
One other point - the forum is quite a mess right now, and we understand how hard it is to read the thread titles or find stuff in your area. The mods are working out some thread title formatting and other things to make the forum more readable/searchable and I expect they'll be editing the titles of the current threads to make them more friendly. Soooo, don't be suprised if your favorite threads change names soon. Just a warning.
 
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i dont get what the big deal was about having a few forums that were less active. we LIKED having our own little canada forum...how hard do you think its gonna be for any canadians to spot events now that there gonna get bumped off page one in half a day. the yanks have wayyyyy more events than us, so the few that we do post are gonna be lost in the sea of american parties. great...
 
[Edited by TLB: the following was sent over from the same thread in the NASocial forum - since it pertained more to events, I've merged it over here]

yeah I'd be down to do a list. There are some lists already out for events far ahead into the year.

1)All Ages

2)19+

Would be a distinction.

How local? Universities have tons of small scale events as opposed to big Gatecrasher events, etc. Or major clubs, Aria and Guvernment/Koolhaus being an example have tons of acts coming in.

Toronto/Quebec/East Coast is enough in and of itself (There are like 50 odd events in Toronto alone (and more for if you take in Montreal) for May.
Of edm (excluding downtempo, more avantgarde stuff, Kraftwerk style stuff) alone. Prob more, I'd say 50 good headliner shows.
 
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i dont like this idea at all. Not one bit.

I liked the subforums, it was easy to go into an area and find stuff. Regardless of thread titles this is never going to be as easy. I agree with d4n.

Yuck

:|
 
bah, there is no reason to "kill" slower events forums...they saved everyone the hassle of sifting through hundreds of posts that have absolutely no relevance to them. what do i care about events going on in the south east US...its 3000 miles away! and none of the solutions offered up in that thread show any signs of promise in helping people in the 'slower' areas of north america find posts that pertain to them; if you think canadian events posting was dead before this, you wait and see how many things get posted after...there wont be a point at all. this new events forum will be 100% dominated by the busiest areas.
i don't get this reactionary stance that you guys are taking...whats the big deal with having those forums? do they take up too much space on the main page or something?


ohh...and had you guys made a post about this in the first place, instead of just impossing it, i think you would have found the majority of blers liked it the way it was.
 
dreamgirlie19 said:
i dont like this idea at all. Not one bit.

I liked the subforums, it was easy to go into an area and find stuff. Regardless of thread titles this is never going to be as easy. I agree with d4n.

Yuck

:|

I totally agree.

Not to bash you guys because I know you all work hard and you obviously have your reasons for reconstructing the forums. But I think it's a bad bad bad idea. It's too cluttered. It makes browsing the events forum very difficult. At least when it was split by zones (example: Northeast events) it was for just a handful of states... and I could skim the forum and check out events that were closest to me. There are just way too many states to all be combined into one forum 8o

How the hell are we going to be able to find anything? :( And I don't think too many people from (example) NE events care about what's going on in California seeing as how it's across the country. And if we were going to be in that area we could have easily just checked out the appropriate forum.

Messy messy messy :( And confusing.

No offense. I'm just stating my opinion on it. I know you guys have good reasons for all that you do and that you're just trying to make BL better. So I'll suck it up and deal with it I guess :D
 
day_for_night said:
ohh...and had you guys made a post about this in the first place, instead of just impossing it, i think you would have found the majority of blers liked it the way it was.

Agreed.

If things stay the way they are then I really doubt I'll use the BL events page to look for events. I'll post about the monthly I always do... and if I know of a big party I'm going to I may look for that thread to respond in it.

But it would be such a waste to look at all this shit from 50 states plus canada 8( ..... and correct me if I'm wrong but South America too??!!? Holy fuck.
 
Northeast events forum was the one forum i actually checked every day. I dont care whats going on 3000 miles away in Seattle or Hawaii. I want to know whats goin on down the street or in Eastern Canada. I think to combine 50 STATES into one huge forum that is now going to span more than 3000 miles is HORRIBLE. Yes its messy now because you just did it, but do you honestly think it will improve. Come on....!?! Do they REALLY take up that much room to have to rid the site of them. I understand BL isnt a democracy but seriously, this affects a lot of bluelighters and i dont think the positive response will be the majority here.

Oh, and a NA social??? Stupid idea imo. Sadly i care enough about bluelight to be upsrt over this. :(
 
TheLoveBandit said:
However, over the past few years, the traffic in these forums has dropped considerably due to various reasons. One of the basic questions any forum has to be asked periodically is ‘If this forum didn’t exist, is there enough reason to create it’ and with that reasoning, several forums might have faced elimination. Instead, we chose to merge our regions back together into a more active forum.

So what if traffic in certain forums is low? Those regions still have events. People in those regions still want to make plans to meetup at parties. Why would you consider getting rid of a certain region's events forum just because it didn't get much traffic? Maybe there just aren't a lot of people in a certain area. But as it was there were several states encompassing each regional forum.

Maybe if the traffic in the forum was so low it would have made more sense to try and remedy that? Have moderators focus more on posting events themselves instead of just leaving it up to members?

I dunno... I just think this is horrible. I'm with Dreamgirlie19 and Day_For_Night on this. I don't see myself wanting to post here :(

And this was a forum I would check daily and I was active in (NE events that is). And I think NE events was my favorite forum :( I love the NE BL'ers <3
 
TheLoveBandit said:
d4n - read my last paragraph, then check this thread in NASocial where two other Canadiens are discussing how this effects our members from there and what can be done about it.

Another thing...

The flag idea is silly because Canada would be the only one in need of that. Yet if they are 3000 miles away from the US in parts, what about the states that are 3000 miles away. 50 flags...i think not.
 
[Edited by TLB: the following was moved from the same thread in NASocial - but it pertained to events so it's over here now]

From an administrative point of view, the question can be asked - is there enough traffic to create a (sub)forum? And we both know while the CAN region had it's nice little group, it certainly didn't generate the traffic the other forums did...and they all got merged as well, depsite the fact that probably over half your threads were social in nature. :\

For now, I'd say a directory/subdirectory thingie is going to have to wait and see if we get enough threads in NAEvents or NASocial to warrant their creation.

=============

jp - honestly, we anticipate the NAEvents getting opened up to more than our usual types of posts. We'll still have the headliner djs and such, but we'd also like to list things from all social gatherings - so just about anything you want to put up there would be appreciated. We've got people that are both + and - 19, and as for how local...well, we won't know if we've got members (or can get members) from areas unless we start telling them what's going on in those cities, so whatever you think might draw some people to BL. Would you mind if I split some of the replies out of this thread and merge it into the same discussion in NAEvents, that way the social discussion can continue here and the events discussion can continue there?
 
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TheLoveBandit said:
For NAEvents, we are looking into title formatting, which we hope will improve readability and searchability

I truly dont see how thats possible. Even with formatting, there is 50 states with say 3-4 updated list of events going on at any given weekend. Never mind the weekly/monthly event threads. Way too confusing, as well as time consuming. I personally have made a move back to dial up temporarily and lemme tell ya, it SUCKS trying to find anything in these forums now :(:\
 
I also agree... I loved the fact that I could check Northeast Meetups and had events specific to my area.... As most of us know once a thread goes to page two its hardly seen by others..... If the reason this was done was to give low traffic areas a bit more traffic I think it's stupid... Should people in an area such as the Northeast suffer looking through other nonrelevant area posts just because the other areas are not happening enough??? I dunno about anyone else but being from the Northeast what goes on in cali, canada etc etc doesnt interest me cause of the shear fact of traveling($$$$$) so I would prefer not to know what was going on....................... Bring Back NE Meetups!!
 
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