(17 Apr 2014, 6:40 am)Andreos Constantopolous wrote The North West and to a lesser extent Scotland and Yorkshire possibly need this now.
You said yourself the North West thread contributed to half of the elsewhere posts and is easily the most active area beyond the North East scene.

Just tried reading/catching up and ended up giving up.

I think it will be the right time to 'convert' the section when it turns into discussion and not just information given by a few people. I read a lot of the posts when merging the threads and quite a number of the threads only had three or four replies to the OP in each, with information being given by the same few people rather than it being discussed.

A prime example of this was VOSA registrations. In the North East, one or two people tend to copy these into the relevant thread. After that, we will discuss what the changes could be. I didn't really see that a lot when going through the thread.

The trouble that we face is we simply don't have enough members from the North West contributing, and that in part is linked to another forum existing which is dedicated to buses in the North West. Until we do have a larger number of members, we face one of three problems:

1) Merging all North West threads and potentially making it more difficult to read when we are at a peak of discussion. Perhaps only an issue if someone visits the forum once per day.

2) Having regional sub-forums as suggested, but making the main index page longer in length (meaning more scrolling is needed) and also meaning that you have to file your way through to the actual threads (meaning more clicks are needed). This is the reason why we ditched sub-forums in the main North East section, because Liam thinks they're terribly non user-friendly. I do believe the majority of people on the forum voted against them in a poll we did too?

3) If we had done nothing at all, we would have had 93 threads in a section which potentially would have been overlooked. Excluding Lothian Buses, I pretty much ditched the 'Elsewhere' section as it was too difficult to use. I was having to use the search bar to get to the thread I wanted to get to, and this was frankly off-putting.

I took a brief tour of other bus forums last night before coming forward with the idea, and the fair majority faced the last problem - with very few looking to rectify what was an issue.

We are always looking forward on this website which is why we do see regular changes. This is all done with the user in mind. Like I said before, we will see how this works - put it on a trial period if you will. If it's successful, it can remain like it is now until I'm confronted by one of the main 'Elsewhere' contributors that they feel differently. If it's not, we'll have to come up with an alternative solution.