Forum Suggestions & User Assistance - How about regional sub-forums?

What do y'all think of creating regional sub-forums so that members that are from the same area can discuss local rides, shops, advocacy and safety concerns in a given area, trail info, clubs and so forth? These would be things that wouldn't neccessarily be of interest to everyone on BF, but good to have if there are enough members in a given area to make it worthwhile. For instance, there are quite a few members from the Houston and surrounding area, and it would be nice to have a forum where all the area clubs and riders can share info and local announcements. Would that be a worthwhile addition to the BF site?

Or perhaps a New Zealand, and Australia forums or combine the two with an Australasian forum?

Brendon

Yeah, that's pretty much what I had in mind -- creating several regional forums based on where our members are from. This way folks can use BF as a local resource in addition to the topics discussed by the wider BF audience. This could also be a way to get new members on the board, since the link to a regional forum could be emailed to your local clubs and bike shops whenever there's a event of local interest.

I'm all for this. RM has something like this but it's pretty broad. A dirt bike forum that I am a member of even has local club sub-forums and only members of that sub-forum can view/post in their own section. This might be a pain to set up but would be extremely useful. Lots of our local clubs have their own local forums but they have limited usage, and by doing something like that here a member would still have access to the entire BF membership for non-local discussions.

I thought that this would be a great way to communicate between area bike clubs and organizations, as well as bringing in new members to BF. For instance, in Houston there are dozens of clubs and organizations for cyclists, each with their own forum or email list or whatever. There are also many BF forums members from the Houston area (again, just an example -- there are other areas that should be included as well). If something happens that's of interest to anyone in the area (such as the recent problems with Clear Channel in Houston), it's difficult to get the word out to all these different sources, but a common forum that could be used by all these entities would be a tremendous help. In the past we've announced things in the general BF forums, but it seems like it would be better to have regional sub-forums for such things. Once created, the links to register and find the local forum could be sent to all the area groups and they could use BF as an area-wide umbrella forum that supplements their own communications.