Separate forums for DSLR body lines?

[jubu]

I guess it's just from being on lots of Auto forums over the past years that makes me think this may help organize threads, but would it be feasible to have separate forums for the various body lines?

Coming from a background in BMW forums for example, we would have forums for varying body styles, such as:

3-Series (318i,is/325i,is/328i,is)
5-Series (528i,iT/540i,It)


Would this be beneficial to POTN? For example:

1D/Ds Series Forums (Classic, Mk2, Mk2n, Mk3, Mk4)
xD Series Forums (5D, 5D2, 7D)
xxD Series Forums (10D, 20D, 30D, 40D, 50D)
xxxD Series Forums (300D, 350D, 400D, 450D, 500D)
...and so on and so forth

Not saying this is the best idea since sliced bread; just wondering why the forums weren't setup this way. I just think it may help in keeping threads on similar body styles together. For example, xxxD questions (i.e. 450D and 500D) could be beneficial to either camera's owners as the controls and menus are usually similar, and the same could possibly be said for 40D and 50D posts, etc.

On the other hand, this has probably been thought of before and I'm missing something obvious which would not allow this to work...I dunno. Tried searching, but I didn't find a thread really exploring/discussing this.

Just my $0.02...

[Todd Lambert]

There's many here who have several bodies or who've used and have considerable experience with multiple bodies. Because of that I think it's better to have them all lumped together, since there is a better chance that someone will see the post.

If you segment everything, people may be less inclined to browse all the individual forums for each of their bodies or experience.

[Todd Lambert]

Also, the search feature here is pretty darn decent, so if you do want to segment something out, it's pretty easy to do with the search feature.

[mikekelley]

I would love a separate forum for different bodies but it would never happen, there's arguments to both sides though.

[Jon]

Most of the questions that come up aren't body-specific. You won't get a lot of the 1D-series (say) users prowling through even an "All Rebels" forum let alone a 300D forum, but you'd get valuable answers from them about most technical questions.

[Bill Boehme]

POTN does what they have learned through experience to be the best fit for the culture here. What happens on auto forums does not necessarily equate to woodworking, cooking, or photography.

One of the woodworking forums that I participated in killed itself by fragmenting into a wide range of topics which managed to dilute the sharing of knowledge that previously was global to the woodworking forum community.

Another site with light participation learned a lesson from this and was saved from the same fate by resisting the efforts by some to subdivide into absurdly restricted topics.

POTN is oriented to be Canon specific and has a large number of subgroups. POTN is large, but not so large that any forum is being choked by heavy traffic. My observation is that any petition for another group needs substantive convincing arguments that are directly relative to the request. The Bird forum is an example of this. My gut feeling about model specific forums is that the interest would be so minimal that it would not get any traction.