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Break out the Regions a little
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Posted by: langod

Could we break out the regional areas a little more?

For instance the area I look at, "northeast", includes: NH, ME, VT, MA, RI, NY, PA, NJ, MD, DE, CT. The events and so on that are listed for Maryland are usually of no interest to Massachusetts residents, and vice versa. (10 hour drive!)

Why not take states like PA, NJ, NY, DE, MD and group them together as "Central Atlantic" and take NH, ME, VT, MA, RI, CT, and make them into a group for "Northeast".

I'm sure this might apply to other regions too.

just a thought......

Posted by: Rick Sample

I've gone round and round about that actually! The problem with adding more forums is that it'll make all our forums in general look dead. Right now we have 5 reginal forums with posts ranging from 50-800. Lets say we broke those 5 forums into 10.Now we're going to have about 8 of those forums with 10-15 posts which will make that section of our site look extremely inactive.

I've actually thought of leaving all the regional sections like they are now then adding subforums to each section. For example, the Northeast forums would have 11 sub forums for each state. You won't be able to see all the subforums on our forums home page, but lets say you clicked on Northeast, It would list all the states. So the user could post and reply to subjects in their state only. I don't know about you, but I don't care about what goes on in the state next to us. If their's a car show, we're not going to travel out of state.

I dunno, anyone else have any thoughts?

Posted by: Xerxeese

The sub forums would wor. I have just one question , though. Would the subforums share the same moderators, or would each SF get thier own mods ?

Posted by: Rick Sample

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xerxeese

The sub forums would wor. I have just one question , though. Would the subforums share the same moderators, or would each SF get thier own mods ?

They could each have their own or we could have one for the entire section.

Posted by: Xerxeese

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rick Sample

They could each have their own or we could have one for the entire section.

Then I am all for it

Posted by: ExBamaGal

I agree with the sub-forum idea also. I like the idea of being able to keep the events split up to that particular state so if anyone is interested they don't have to look through events in several states to find the ones closest to them.

Posted by: Xerxeese

You could always make a poll of this question.

Posted by: Rick Sample

Well we have 3 options

1. Have a forum labled regionals on the forum home, when a user clicks on regionals they will be taken to the secone page where it lists ALL states.

2. Have a forum labled regionals on the forum home, when a user clicks on regionals they will be taken to a second page where it lists: Northeast, Southeast, Centeral, etc. When a user clicks on one of those, they will then be taken to a 3rd page where it lists the states.

3. Have Northeast, Southest, Centeral, ect on forum home, when a user clicks on one, they will then be taken to a second page where it lists the state for that section.

What do you guys like best? I personally like option 1 best because it will shorten up the home page of our forum. Right now we have 79 posts in this forum, 79 in this forum, 29 in this forum, etc. If we chose option 1, it'll just be X,XXX posts in this forum. Making our site appeare larger than what it really is. Then again I also like option 3. I don't really like option 2 because it will take to long to access navigation wise! Any thoughts or suggestions?

Posted by: langod

I like the # 1.
Could we have the ability to "cross-post"? For instance, I live in NH, but quite close to the Massachusetts border (as do Tony, Badass and Xerxeese, I think) -- I often attend shows and cruises in either state. It would be cool to be able to post in multiple sub-forums. Or at least have a link show up in other State forums. You could limit it to no more than two additional state links or something maybe to prevent spamming.

Posted by: langod

Oh -- and I'll volunteer to be the NH moderator if you need someone....

Posted by: ExBamaGal

I like options 1 the most. Like you said, it's cleans up the forum home page a little and it's easy to get to navigation wise.

langod...right now you can post in any region you want. I see no need to change that as we do not really have a problem with spammers in the regional sections.

Posted by: Rick Sample

Quote:

Originally Posted by langod

I like the # 1.
Could we have the ability to "cross-post"? For instance, I live in NH, but quite close to the Massachusetts border (as do Tony, Badass and Xerxeese, I think) -- I often attend shows and cruises in either state. It would be cool to be able to post in multiple sub-forums. Or at least have a link show up in other State forums. You could limit it to no more than two additional state links or something maybe to prevent spamming.

We don't have the ability to cross-post or at least I don't know how to do that. That is one significant drawback to this. I'd imagine for the people that lived on the boarders, they would check the state they live in and the neighboring state. For instance if you posted an event, I wouln't have a problem if you posted a thread in X forum and the same one in X forum since you live on the boarder!

Posted by: Rick Sample

Quote:

Originally Posted by langod

Oh -- and I'll volunteer to be the NH moderator if you need someone....

I'm really not sure how we are going to do the moderators. If we had a moderator for each state. We would have well over 70 moderators. I'm not sure if it would be best to do it like that or to have, for example, 10 moderators for all states.

Posted by: Xerxeese

Quote:

Originally Posted by langod

Im liking opt. 1 as well. Cross posting would also rapidly increase the # of posts total on the site (Rick, was it 200,000 you wanted?) I too would be cross posting as I play as much in Mass as I do in NH.

Posted by: Rick Sample

I'll get this setup so we can see how it looks whenver I get a free moment this weekend!

Posted by: Rick Sample

I'm having second thoughts now lol. I'm only to the M's and that list is massive!

Posted by: ExBamaGal

haha...well Rick, there are 50 states

Posted by: Rick Sample

I got it all set up, I'm not sure I'm fealing it even though it is growing on me! We're going to have alot of forums with "0" posts though

I don't want search engines in their yet, so copy and paste this URL: muscle-mustangs.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=118

Suggestions, Comments, Criticism

Posted by: ExBamaGal

Well, it's definately a long page lol. I'm with you Rick...I sort of like it and I sort of don't. Let's see what some of the other members say. If this doesn't work out I say we try to group the surrounding states into groups of 3-4 and see how that goes.

Posted by: Rick Sample

Yeah, I think we should go with langod's suggestion with creating smaller groups of 3-5 first. Then maybe in a few years when we get more members/posts, we could split those up into individual states! Instead of taking one big leap we could take smaller steps.

Does anyone want to try to come up with forum titles like Langod suggested with the state to which they should include?

Posted by: ExBamaGal

If I get a chance before I go home (or after I get home) I'll look at it

Posted by: Xerxeese

Grouping would probably be better. New England itself may even be too huge. (this was an issue with the cougar forums, people from Maine not wanting to hear about things going on in CT)
Example found at www.newcougar.org/forums

Posted by: langod

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xerxeese

Grouping would probably be better. New England itself may even be too huge. (this was an issue with the cougar forums, people from Maine not wanting to hear about things going on in CT)
Example found at www.newcougar.org/forums

Well you're never going to satisfy everyone. After looking at the sample page, I think the list of 50 states is too big also.

I think breaking new England out of the Northeast would be reasonable. And maybe splitting the NY/NJ/PA "tri-state" area off into it's own group would be good. Perhaps a "DelMarVa" area for DE/MD/VA.

I'm gonna stop there because that's the extent of the geography I'm most familiar with -- I'm an east coaster -- I've been to every state along the east coast, but I've never been west of Pa.

Remember, we're just trying to make the regions "reasonable" not perfect. Grouping Delaware in the same group with Maine was a little unwieldy -- putting Vermont in with Mass and CT is less so.

Rick, If I get some time today, I'll take a look at a map (and maybe my employers breakout of USA sales rep areas) and see if I can get you a new regions list.

Posted by: ExBamaGal

Sorry, I didn't get time at work. We were unusually busy this weekend. Everyone make suggestions on how you think they should be split up.

Thanks for your help langod!

Posted by: langod

Here's my list of potential forums. Comes out to 14 or 15 depending whether you combine California into one or break it into two forums for NoCal and SoCal. (My thinking is that there is probably a big enough population to support each and that Calif. is so big it might require two)

I'm sure some of the states grouping will need tweaking -- as I said above, I'm not familiar with the US outside of the east coast.

Another note -- I'm not sure where to put West Va. Should it go with Virginia, or states like KY and TN?

Anyway -- here's the list. Flame on!

NEW ENGLAND (ME, NH, VT, MA, CT, RI)
NY TRI-STATE (NY, NJ, PA)
DELMARVA (DE, MD, VA, WV?)
SOUTH ATLANTIC (NC, SC, GA, FL)
SOUTH (KY, TN, MS, AL, LA, AR)
EAST CENTRAL (WI,MI. IL, IN, OH)
TEXAS
MIDWEST (OK, KS, MO)
NORTH CENTRAL (NE, IA, ND, SD, MN)
MOUNTAIN (MT, WY, UT, CO)
SOUTHWEST (AZ, NV, NM)
CALIFORNIA (Maybe 2 Calif. forums? Northern and Southern?)
NORTHWEST (WA, OR, ID)
Finally, Alaska/Hawaii as another group, I guess.

Posted by: Rick Sample

Looks good so far! I'll have get out my map this weekend to make sure those names go great with the states! I think we should include California and Texas in a section though. Only because I don't think we have any users from those two states yet. I know those are two of our largest states though lol

Posted by: langod

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rick Sample

Looks good so far! I'll have get out my map this weekend to make sure those names go great with the states! I think we should include California and Texas in a section though. Only because I don't think we have any users from those two states yet. I know those are two of our largest states though lol

can you generate any sort of members-by-state breakdown? That might help a lot!

Posted by: Rick Sample

Quote:

Originally Posted by langod

can you generate any sort of members-by-state breakdown? That might help a lot!

I just enabled it for you: http://www.muscle-mustangs.com/forum....php?do=search All you have to do is type the state in the location field!

Posted by: langod

I played around with the search a bit, but unfortunately it's completely dependent on matching what you type with what's in the users profile. So if you type NH you'll get anyone with "NH" in their profile, but not New Hampshire. Also, I tried typing in "CA" for Califonia, but got 87 hits -- some were calif, but others were things like "CArver, Ma"....
And I bet we get some jokers who are basically unsearchable because they put "Circling Uranus", etc... LOL

It did seem that you are right about Calif users -- doesn't seem like too many active users. So add to my above suggestion -- Make only one California group. And add W.Va to the DelMarVa group.

done!