Since the original post was made, some members of the North East Buses forum management team have been discussing your suggestion. As with all suggestions - from members of management and from members of the community alike - we looked at the full situation.
We wholeheartedly agree that our Go North East thread in the "Bus Operator" forum has been incredibly successful - more successful than we had ever aspired it to be in such a short period of time. If we view the threads in the "Bus Operator" forum by the amount of replies the threads have received (see here), we can see a massive difference between the threads - mainly the Go North East thread. Some of those threads have had zero replies, and I must admit that this was fully expected when, late last year, I decided to make a thread for independents within the North East that run Tyne & Wear operations. Should an opportunity arise for news to be added to the appropriate company thread, we already have it prepared though!
As a recent "project", Liam and I (mainly Liam - I shouldn't really be taking any credit) have been trying to make the whole forum look a lot "cleaner". A few things have been removed, and new things have been added. Members now have the ability to minimise specific forum categories, if they so wish - see example in link below:
http://d.pr/i/c8nA
In the above example, I have minimised the "Forum Team" forum category which is only visible to administrators, but the "Local Bus Scene" category remains active. Also visible in the above screenshot is a blue arrow, representing a new forum post - also added in a recent update. While browsing the forum, you will notice some minor updates which we haven't made a note of, but this is all part of a big update the site is going through, and will continue to go through for a month or two. All of the site's administrators are continuously working to improve the forum, but most of it is "behind the scenes" at the moment.
You will also notice that our forum categories and the forums within those categories all follow similar patterns. Our primary topic of discussion is buses within the North East, and this is actively demonstrated by the continual use of the "Local Bus Scene" category, the forums and/or the threads within those forums. To make things look more uniform, our "The Bus Scene Elsewhere" forum is maintained the same way in which the one closer to home is. We would like to continue to do this, as we believe it's simplistic and much more appealing to view. The threads within these forums are (by default) ordered by last post, so having an extremely active topic at the top of the list of threads within a topic is quite common. As we would like to continue how this works, if we were to go through with your suggestion for the Go North East thread, we would have to replicate it in the other operators' threads too.
If we were to disregard the above points in this post (which have slightly drifted off-topic - I'm a little tired), Andreos1 made an important point in his response. Liam and I have looked into what we would have to do to make the suggestion possible, and we think that we would have to create sub-forums under the "Bus Operators" forum, one for Go North East, another for Arriva North East, another for Stagecoach North East and a final for North East Independent Operators. Under these sub-forums, threads could then subsequently be made. As stated in the original post, the material covered in the Go North East thread is diverse. Surely this would be carried out into the new individual threads? A particular topic may have 50 pages, and another with 30. Some topics have only been touched on once or twice, and then we'd be faced with a lot of new threads with very few replies in each. New threads would be created by the day as it would be left to the poster's discretion whether it "fits into" an existing thread or not, and I could see this leading to some controversy. The organisation of these sub-forums would then seem mandatory, and it would be a lot less simplistic.
Penultimately, the forum team would have to move all of the existing posts under the "Bus Operators" forum and its respective threads into these new sub-forums. A strenuous task, which I'm sure you'll agree - not something which could be done in a few hours. I don't think it'd be irrational to suggest that some forum downtime would also be required for an extensive amount of this work to be completed by the whole team. There are four of us, but there's only so much work we can do between us in time.
To conclude, while we do think it is a great idea and we would love to have seen it work, the majority decision is that it wouldn't work. The threads will soon fill up again; common threads are always going to be popular and get a vast amount of replies, thereby leading to a possible similar suggestion to this in the future. A suggestion like this would have been more feasible in the early stages of the Go North East thread eruption. A personal project of my own is to be carried out and finalised this weekend, and should be made public early next week, after thorough testing by forum management first - to see if the idea will definitely work. On behalf of forum management, I would like to thank you once more for the suggestion. As I said in the opening paragraph of this post, your suggestions help the site evolve, and it goes without saying that every suggestion is seriously considered by us all. Perhaps I should also congratulate anyone who manages to make their way through this full post without dying of boredom?
