Board mergers, LA with SFBA especially.

Regional Dining Discussions SF Bay Area, NorCal, Tahoe
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Hungryonion posted this in the Site discussions board a while ago. I guess this means we should start including SFBA or specific Bay Area locations in the topic titles from now on.

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hungryonion
A few lower traffic boards are merged in order to avoid the problem of ‘perceived low traffic-> little incentive to click into the board -> cause even lower traffic’ syndrome. These boards are merged to stimulate traffic:

Regional:

Midwest-> All other US
Southeast -> All other US
Rest of California-> SF+Cal
Southwest-> All other US
DC -> All other US
Northwest mountain states-> All other US
Vancouver->Quebec and Canada

Topical:

Fermented-> Cooking+Ingredients
Vegetarian/ Vegan + Other Diets -> Specific Diets
Food porn-> other boards

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Always good to specify locations in titles. But given the relative traffic, that’s especially important for non-Bay Area posts.

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I think most of the posts already have locations specified.

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Much as I take glee from LA’s inclusion in “other” California, I think its a little extreme and will guarantee that posters in LA will continue to ignore HO. The same could be said of Vancouver. I think it would be better to encourage locals in those areas to “seed” the board.

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IMO, a better option would be Northern California and Southern California.

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HO should merge with FTC where LA board is much more active and SFBA board is much less active despite some ppl x-posting to both.

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That was my thought – SF and Northern California, LA and Southern California.

“But where the hell are the Tehachapis?”

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I hear you and the rationale. Though the seeding part, for any boards that has no activities, is challenging unless there are more than a few eaters in the region ready/ able to post prolifically for months or even longer at the same time, with media PR help along the way. that’s pretty much the only way to get a board going (at least as far as I know). We don’t have that seed in the LA board, and it hasn’t attracted any traffic from the LA area. among the 10 or so threads in the past year, i think 9 were from Bay Area folks. the obvious reason is LA Chowhound folks have their home and they look to be comfy there. so no obvious incentive to be anywhere else.

We’ve had numerous requests for boards in the first year, basically an attempt to address the issue of ‘if there is no home, three is no incentive to post’. It certainly can be partially true. But the common phrase ‘if you build it they will come’ is not true in practice. What happened here often was after the boards (e.g. JP, SoCal, FL) were created, they were quiet for months, and ended up no busier than as part of a larger regional boards. So we end up with a board categorization structure similar to the modern-day Chowhound without the 2012-ish Chowhound traffic to support, and a number of little trafficked boards. I take the contrarian view, that empty boards are a powerful motivation not to post- ‘No one’s here anyway, let’s not waste time. move on’. This problem is not just a problem here but forums everywhere else. Arguably Chowhound has too many boards, or tags, or whatever they call them now. For newbies that aren’t familiar with Chowhound, which we want to attract to the site for the first time with the new Q&A series, a large number of empty boards can actually serve as a pretty bad advertisement for ourselves.

For all successful social networks, all of them built up one region/ section first before they worked on the next. E.g. Facebook at Harvard, then Ivy Leagues. I think it’d be to our benefit for us to get our existing communities to prosper first.

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Or, HO directs SoCalistas to FTC while FTC directs Bay Area folks (aka normal, decent human beings) to HO. Each board capitalizes on its regional strengths while acknowledging the strengths of the other board.

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