shakran

But apparently they're not enough of a major part of TFPers' lives because there just aren't that many posts out there regarding pets.


I know TFP tried regional forums before, as has already been mentioned in this thread. I remember that users begged for them, swore up and down they'd be immensely popular, and then when the admins finally made them, every forum except one region was a ghost town.

I haven't tried any on here because I'm not a mod/admin (yes I know it can be tough to tell who is since the redesign. Hint Hint admins ) but when I ran my own forum many years ago I learned the important lesson that you should not throw up a forum just because a user asks for it.

Here's the scenario. You start with a general forum. Users want a car forum so you put that up. All car posts (say, 2 a day) that were in general now go in the car board. Same with pets, music, coin collecting, marching band discussion. . .whatever.

Pretty soon you wind up with a bunch of special interest forums that only have 2 posts per day MAX in them, AND you've siphoned a bunch of posts off the general forum so there's only a few per day there too.

Now a new user signs up. He looks over the board, sees that activity on the various forums is extremely light, and goes off looking for a board that appears to be more populated, never to be seen in these parts again.

On my old board we only made a new forum if there were enough posts on that topic in the general discussion forum. The topic basically had to be taking over the general forum, and then we'd make a home for it to keep
general free for other topics.

I found it to be a pretty good rule of thumb and from what I can tell that's what the admins here are doing as well.