It's been my experience that many folks will eventually limit themselves to the few forums on a site that they habitually visit, to the complete exclusion of all the rest of them. At least once a site gets big enough and traffic robust enough that they have to begin filtering the messages based on personal interest. People WILL get set in their ways over time.
Which is exactly the reason that I chose to NOT have separate forums for all 6 generations of Corvettes. I believe that doing so will create a barrier between the memberships based on whatever generation(s) they are interested in to the exclusion of all the members with a differing interest.
I believe this applies to regional and local events in Florida as well.
What my goal has been with this site has been to have a meeting place for ALL Florida Corvettes and the people with an interest in them. I WANT people to see the excitement and interest in events that are not local to them. Why? Because just maybe they will be so intrigued by all that obvious participation, that they will perhaps decide to make the drive to join in as well. And it may also provide some incentive to use such an event as a yardstick to spur on events in their own area to strive to make their own comparable. Thereby perhaps encouraging people from other areas to join in with THEIR event.
Florida is a pretty big state, but not so big that it is not feasible for EVERYONE here to visit any event anywhere within the state. Heck, I would not be at all opposed to people posting events in Georgia and Alabama (or really ANYWHERE) as well, since DRIVING a Corvette is really where the fun is. So just driving to a long distance event will be every bit as much fun as just BEING at the event.
So that is my intent. To try to make this seem like a family to all of us. Not a situation where we all go to our separate rooms and not speak to any of those in those other rooms we don't bother to visit.
With that being said, once the new version of vBulletin goes into final release, I will be converting this site over to that new version. If you look at the way I have the events forum set up over on CorvetteInternational (
http://www.corvetteinternational.com...splay.php?f=12), I can do something similar here whereby a TAG is placed at the beginning of every thread posted in the Events and Happenings forum. So at a glance, someone will be able to determine which region the event takes place in. And if traffic and thread volume warrants it, they can set a filter condition to ONLY display those events for a region of their choosing. I think when this is implemented, it will satisfy what appears to be conflicting goals for that forum.