Thanks avrooster for taking my word. The admin on the site is very rudimentary. Just another reason why we are moving to another platform.

Katie,

I am all for splitting the Latin America Forum in two. It makes a lot of sense.

Well, I don't know. Of todays 28 entries, 12 have to do with South America., 2 Mexico, 8 for Central America and a number unable to be determined from the title.

Ironically the 29th entry requests info about both Central and South America, and was purposely posted before the proposed split.

I think suze is right. You'll have two slower forums, and zero cross pollination.

Thank you, Fra_diavolo, for understanding my thinking.

Regardless of which 1/2 of the forum's post I might specifically want to read (my interest being Mexico), I'd rather scroll thru a dozen posts about Central and South America, instead of opening up a branch that only gets a few new posts per day.

It's about *energy* of a forum, not just the organization of information.

What would really help is if the "new post" forced the selection of a country from the available dropdown and that country was displayed as part of the title of the thread automatically.

Great suggestion!

That's a great idea, eenusa. I'll check if it's possible.

Good idea. Gitter done.

Just wanted to follow up on this. We are due to launch with our upgraded forums in February.

The Latin America forum will remain as is when we launch, but in the weeks following the launch we will move to split the forum into two as proposed above (Mexico & Central America as one forum, South America as the other).

Thanks for being so patient in this long process... let me know if you have any questions or other feedback.

Katie, will you also be providing a forum for the Polar Regions?

At the moment Antarctica tends to get lost amid South America, Australia & Pacific and Cruises forums and I would imagine The Arctic may get similarly split.

Yes - great idea.

Kavey--I will definitely keep this in mind. We won't be able to add new forums for some time; we need to make sure everything we currently have is working correctly post-relaunch. But I won't forget.

I didn't realize that it was a relatively popular topic--but I now understand that all of the various posts for that particular type of travel (Antartica) are spread out across multiple forums.

Thanks-

Thanks, Katie, much appreciated.
I think there's two things at play in terms of assessing popularity:
a) as we've agreed, the posts for the topic are spread across a number of forums
b) people who might otherwise want to read or discuss or ask about polar travel tend not to to do so because there's no obvious home for those threads here

Seems like the forum will be split. But I preference would've been to keep it as one Latin America forum. Let's hope the split increases the traffic/posts. If not, I hope we can go ack to combining the 2 forums.

Thanks for letting us know, Katie.

I bet a million bucks that we will end up with two forums that are even less interesting, and get even less traffic than this one.

I think it's a HUGE mistake that will lead to two dull forums that get only a few posts per day. I mean count how many Latin America gets now and divide by two. Boooring.

I understand everyone's concerns. One concern that we have is that the one category of Latin America is not consistent with how we represent these two large areas elsewhere on our site. We also do lose quite a bit of search traffic (from outside searches) due to the naming convention.

If this particular forum does not receive many posts now, I don't necessarily think that means that we should fear making any changes. The changes might actually improve the number of postings.

We are making new content available in the new layout (like Trip Reports, Topics with most replies, New Topics) and I think many of these additions will stimulate more activity. There's obviously a lot of quality information to be tapped here and we want to make it easier for folks to find it.

Katie,

Will the new forum have this feature suggested during your original posting and feedback:

Change it so the "new post" forces the selection of a country from the available dropdown and that country was displayed as part of the title of the thread automatically.

Now that would be nice.
I often wade through a gazillion Costa Rica threads to find anything on Argentina.. going just by titles.

Yes, the forum should be split.

yippee...I like some of the suggested changes in formatting.