Should We Consolidate the Regional Forums?
 

In this thread Claus pointed out that the regional forums have received very little use, and he is correct. We initially set these up to replace the Regional User Group areas that were part of the main CAUG web site on the old server. We decided to use forums so we wouldn't have to carry over the custom scripts that it used. I suspect that usage has been low since CoCreate stopped actively managing/promoting the user groups.

It does seem like a waste of home page space to have all those unused forums. One option would be to consolidate them into a single "Regional User Groups" forum that anyone could use to post information of interest to specific regions. We could suggest that anyone who posts in that forum put the region in the title to make it obvious. I can move and rename the existing threads in the current Regional forums into the new forum and follow this guideline.

So I am posting a poll to find out how people feel about this. Please vote if you have an opinion.

I agree it makes more sense to consolidate them. I doubt there is enough traffic to justify keeping them separate. It might help, though, to have in the Subject line a description indicating for which region the topic is regarding. For example:

California: Upcoming User Group Meeting, 10/10/2004.

It would make it easier to spot posts pertaining to a region of interest.

As of June 21, 2004 there were four Yes votes and zero No votes so I consolidated the forums into the new "Regional User Groups" forum under the "General" category. See this thread which is at the top of that forum which provides a title guideline as suggested above.

Let me now if you see anything that needs to be changed or fixed.