Regional forums?

any thoughts on creating regional forums for local folks to talk and organize meets etc?

Member Activities looks regional to me.

acevesf wrote in post #17704524
any thoughts on creating regional forums for local folks to talk and organize meets etc?

I think it might add too much to the forum index.

BUT, I would love to be able to effectively search for POTN members in my area. I think that it should be REQUIRED for all registered members to list their location on their profile information. And if that were done, then a searchable database would exist, where we could search for members based on location information.

I am not really a fan of people remaining anonymous on public internet forums.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #17704778
I would love to be able to effectively search for POTN members in my area. I think that it should be REQUIRED for all registered members to list their location on their profile information. . . .

I am not really a fan of people remaining anonymous on public internet forums.

Regional threads are in the Activities forum. If a region doesn't have a thread there, any resident can start one.

Anonymity in public protects against stalking and harassment by the odd crazy person who takes a dislike (or an excessive liking) to someone. I had a situation like that when I was an admin on another board.

OhLook wrote in post #17704792
Regional threads are in the Activities forum. If a region doesn't have a thread there, any resident can start one.

Anonymity in public protects against stalking and harassment by the odd crazy person who takes a dislike (or an excessive liking) to someone. I had a situation like that when I was an admin on another board.

In your case, I'm sure it was the excessive liking that was a problem!

I guess I do see the potential value in retaining a degree of privacy, but I can't see how requiring one to provide their location would be a problem, especially if the location did not have to be too specific (for instance, "Eastern Montana" instead of "Billings").

If we ever do have regional forums by necessity the regions would need to be quite large. There are users from around the world on here so if it was divided into areas even as small as individual US states, by the time you created a region for every "State" in the world, there would be hundreds of Forums. On the other hand, if the forums are too large there would be little incentive for the members of the Forums to try to meet up in person.

For my area, Southeast USA may be a little large, but central Mississippi would be too restrictive. I guess the best balance for my location would be the deep south, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama. But even if you break the world down into regions of that size, we would probably still end up with over a hundred regions for the world.