Hi everybody,
In an effort to make all of the regional forums around the world more useful to people travelling outside of the region covered by their local forum, we are implementing some new procedures. This is part of an ongoing effort to make things better, so please bear with us as the process is streamlined or needs to be changed.
Once you understand the goal, I think you'll all agree that this is a good thing.
First, I'll explain what has prompted this and then I'll explain what's changing.
In other parts of the world, the Trips and Local Marketplace forum is a busy place. People use it to plan their dives and events once they know that they are actually going to take place. In SoCal, we do all of this in the main forum. When people come to our local forum wanting to join us on local dives they look into the Trips and Local Marketplace forum first and don't find the info they are looking for. Conversely, when we SoCal members go to other regional forums looking for some scheduled local dives, we tend to not look into the Trips and Local Marketplace forums and miss out on what is going on locally.
The other thing that happens is that we quickly bury some of the non-event threads in the main forum, that would otherwise be of interest to us.
Now I'll share with you what we're going to try in our local SoCal forum. By the way, an example of a busy forum that has done things this way for quite a while is the Florida Conch Divers forum. Mo2vation has had an opportunity to see how this works first hand on a trip to Florida and has seen that it works efficiently.
If you have not scheduled a dive event yet and are simply looking for dive buddies, that can go in the main forum. As soon as you know that you have something going on, one of two things will happen. You can start a new "planning" thread in the Trips and Local Marketplace or you can start planning your event in the thread that you already started. When a thread has moved to the planning stages in the main forum, one of the moderators will move that thread to the Trips and Local Marketplace forum when they notice it has progressed this far. You could also PM a moderator and ask them to move the thread.
In addition to that, any event that is being put on by an dive club or shop whether it is for profit or non-profit will automatically belong in the Trips and Local Marketplace forum. If a thread is started in the main forum to let people know about some cool event that is happening, then it will be moved to the Trips and Local Marketplace. For instance, the Wrinkles planning threads will now be found in the Trips and Local Marketplace forum as will announcements about Chamber Day, The Long Beach Scuba Show, dive shop/certifying agency sponsored events, Chocolate Lobster dives, Underwater Easter Egg Hunts, etc.
We hope to help the SoCal local forum operate more like some of the other forums on the board in order to raise the level of relevance and ease of use across the board.
We won't start doing any of this until next week and are, of course, interested in your thoughts, comments, questions and suggestions.
Christian
In an effort to make all of the regional forums around the world more useful to people travelling outside of the region covered by their local forum, we are implementing some new procedures. This is part of an ongoing effort to make things better, so please bear with us as the process is streamlined or needs to be changed.
Once you understand the goal, I think you'll all agree that this is a good thing.
First, I'll explain what has prompted this and then I'll explain what's changing.
In other parts of the world, the Trips and Local Marketplace forum is a busy place. People use it to plan their dives and events once they know that they are actually going to take place. In SoCal, we do all of this in the main forum. When people come to our local forum wanting to join us on local dives they look into the Trips and Local Marketplace forum first and don't find the info they are looking for. Conversely, when we SoCal members go to other regional forums looking for some scheduled local dives, we tend to not look into the Trips and Local Marketplace forums and miss out on what is going on locally.
The other thing that happens is that we quickly bury some of the non-event threads in the main forum, that would otherwise be of interest to us.
Now I'll share with you what we're going to try in our local SoCal forum. By the way, an example of a busy forum that has done things this way for quite a while is the Florida Conch Divers forum. Mo2vation has had an opportunity to see how this works first hand on a trip to Florida and has seen that it works efficiently.
If you have not scheduled a dive event yet and are simply looking for dive buddies, that can go in the main forum. As soon as you know that you have something going on, one of two things will happen. You can start a new "planning" thread in the Trips and Local Marketplace or you can start planning your event in the thread that you already started. When a thread has moved to the planning stages in the main forum, one of the moderators will move that thread to the Trips and Local Marketplace forum when they notice it has progressed this far. You could also PM a moderator and ask them to move the thread.
In addition to that, any event that is being put on by an dive club or shop whether it is for profit or non-profit will automatically belong in the Trips and Local Marketplace forum. If a thread is started in the main forum to let people know about some cool event that is happening, then it will be moved to the Trips and Local Marketplace. For instance, the Wrinkles planning threads will now be found in the Trips and Local Marketplace forum as will announcements about Chamber Day, The Long Beach Scuba Show, dive shop/certifying agency sponsored events, Chocolate Lobster dives, Underwater Easter Egg Hunts, etc.
We hope to help the SoCal local forum operate more like some of the other forums on the board in order to raise the level of relevance and ease of use across the board.
We won't start doing any of this until next week and are, of course, interested in your thoughts, comments, questions and suggestions.
Christian
