Making the New Sub-forums A Success (Seattle, Spokane: transplants, neighborhoods, live in)

[scirocco22]

We now have new sub-forums for Washington. A recent poll helped the Administrator make the decision to form these new forums based upon over 80% of respondents approving such a division.

To clarify, the 4 sub-forums are primarily the major population centers of the state excluding the cities of Tacoma and Everett. Tacoma and Everett will anchor the general Washington forum with all other discussions pertaining to anything outside of the defined areas of the 4 sub-forums.

At this time, I would like to ask for all of your cooperation in making this new format a success. Simply put, we need TRAFFIC to prove this to be the correct move. I'm in the process of personally contacting the members who participate regularly in those area designations urging them to check the respective forums for posts from new members asking questions or seeking information about the area. We don't want inquiries by new members to go unanswered.

Feel free to ask questions in this thread if there are any confusing issues. We'll try to tweak things that don't make sense as we go along.

May all the new sub-forums have lively and pertinent discussions. Thanks in advance for everybody's continued participation.

[earls]

I did not see the poll and I visit this site often!

A separate one for Seattle makes sense but for these others no because for example I do not live in Olympia or Vancouver but know enough about them to answer questions - yet I am not likely to visit the 'specific' sites' to view questions.

[scirocco22]

Originally Posted by earls

I did not see the poll and I visit this site often!

A separate one for Seattle makes sense but for these others no because for example I do not live in Olympia or Vancouver but know enough about them to answer questions - yet I am not likely to visit the 'specific' sites' to view questions.

The poll was started and made "sticky" on February 1st. The Administrator "unstuck" it on February 8th. He then made the new sub-forum on February 14th. You can still vote but of course the decision has been made and the purpose of this thread is for input now on how to make it work.

Olympia, btw, is still in the main (general) Washington forum.

[allforcats]

I like this new arrangement. Change requires flexibility -- now I look at the top of the page when I open the WA forum. Simple. What I like BEST is that I don't have to roam through a whole list of threads for which I don't know helpful information. This arrangement gives me very quick access to where I can actually be useful. Bravo!

[ScranBarre]

I'm surprised that our forum administrator disagreed with the idea of making a few "regional" sub-forums if there was indeed a discernible interest in them. I plead my case rather well in mid-2007 to have a new sub-forum created in the Keystone State for "Northeastern Pennsylvania", and it was created contingent upon it taking off and sustaining itself; it is now the most popular sub-forum of the four in our state. I've now been lobbying for the creation of a fifth sub-forum for "South Central Pennsylvania," since there are a lot of medium-sized (pop. 50k-75k) cities in a relatively small geographic area (Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, etc.) that complement one another in terms of nightlife, employment, etc. and have garnered a lot of attention on our state forum from incoming transplants. Thus far the administrator doesn't seem to be very keen on the idea of creating a second regional sub-forum for our state, and I think that's because I lobbied for a Lehigh Valley sub-forum (Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton, PA) that still hasn't quite "caught on" yet in popularity the way the Northeastern Pennsylvania one has.

The only rationale I can provide is that when I read about the regions you were proposing they were rather large geographically. "Eastern Washington" could have included anything east of the Puget Sound/Seattle/Tacoma/Olympia/Everett area from Yakima to the Tri-Cities to Wenatchee to Spokane to Walla Walla and everywhere in between. I personally think the Seattle sub-forum should include more than just King County, but I didn't vote on the issue when I had the opportunity to, so I really can't complain. To me Seattle and Tacoma are both essential components of the metropolitan area (hence the SeaTac Airport), so I think the sub-forum should have been made the Seattle/Tacoma sub-forum.

[scirocco22]

Yes, the Eastern Washington area covers a large geographical area but makes a lot of sense to me to have that area in a separate sub-forum because of homogeneity of the region. It is quite different than the western part of the state in terms of climate, terrain, and political leaning and has more commonality with itself than it does to the western part of the state. The forum traffic with such a division would also warrant such a forum too, in my opinion.

Pertaining to the Seattle Area sub-forum, I've been round and round with 4 or 5 members on this issue. We can make a case for each argument. If we were to have a Seattle-Tacoma sub-forum leaving Everett out, it definitely wouldn't make sense. If we were to have a Seattle-Tacoma-Everett sub-forum, we'd have the dissimilarity of discussing the unique neighborhoods within the Seattle city limits in the same forum with areas like Orting or Marysville which aren't necessarily considered even suburbs of Seattle.

There's no perfect solution as to what is included in the Seattle Area sub-forum. I will probably manually add some of the adjoining suburbs in Snohomish and Pierce counties in the Seattle Area (read: King County) sub-forum at some time in the future.