it's been over a month-- how do we like our new boards?

[soupkitten]

my home board is the new msp board. after wading thru posts from 13 midwestern and not-really midwestern states for a few years on the old "midwest" board, it's been really great to finally get our own board. i wanted to give some feedback on how the new board system is working for me, and thought it would be cool to hear how those on other new boards are liking them.

among the things about the new msp board that are mostly positive: 1) the board seems pretty active---whew! 2) to me, it seems like a whole lot of new posters have been posting for the first time, and as a result new info is coming out. there are some great posts about new restaurants in the suburban metro area, for example. this is so invaluable! i really hope that as a result of the new boards we can get more posts going on about our local food scene, local ingredients, local farms/food producers, regional food specialties, etc. i wonder if some of the other new metro area boards are experiencing a similar glut of new posters/new topics?

i've been clicking around on a lot of the other new boards for the last month, and when i've visited the new atlanta, houston, and portland metro boards, for example, or the new "mountain states" multi-state board, i'd kinda hoped to find more discussion going on in these places. otoh-- san diego, philly and seattle metro areas seem to be toodling along quite nicely with their new boards, and the new southeast and new jersey statewide boards seem very active and vibrant. all the same, i'm not completely 100% sure we needed some/all of these new boards, *right at this exact moment* & despite every place's locals' vociferous insistence that "we need our own board in ____ too!". . . some of these new boards have very little activity. i'm honestly really surprised by this. though i do understand wanting to create some boards in anticipation of future discussion-- as a result of doing it *now,* is there really more conversation going on in these areas? more that could be happening/more that was happening before the split? what about the international boards? a post on the japan board today refers to the japan board being "dead"-- is there more or less discussion now? is it easier or harder to find good info?

finally, despite really being an advocate of an exclusively msp-area board for a long time, when we finally did get our own board, i admit to feeling like we were losing a connection to discussions of the surrounding states/areas. it's weird to have to now go to another board to see what's going on in duluth or hudson. i still check in on the "great lakes" board occasionally to see how it's going in wisconsin and outstate mn, and more occasionally (because there isn't much traffic there) on the "great plains" board to check on our neighbors in iowa. oddly, to me it seems like maybe there is actually *less* discussion about iowa restaurants, now that they aren't on some huge sprawling ridiculous board? am i totally off-base? so, what, if anything, do we lose when we narrow the regional discussion? don't get me wrong, i *love* the new msp board and see nothing but potential for great discussion, but i do miss seeing the odd eye-catching post from kansas city or cleveland once in a while.

do the folks who live in areas where the board breakdown didn't really affect their own posting have any opinions?

(btw i actually feel like all the folks calling for their own city's/area's individual board breakdown beat their cases to death on the other thread, and so i'm really not very interested in a zillion responses here about how sheboygan really needs its own board and why the heck don't dc and baltimore have separate boards, etc-- i kind of want to discuss what is going on because of the way the boards now *are,* not what we think would happen if the boards were the way we want them to be, if you follow me. . . so thoughtful responses are most welcome, with very minimal whining-- please)

just to throw it out there, on a format note: i think that the decision to simply move the "not about food" board to the bottom, rather than the top of the list of topical boards on the main chowhound menu, has maybe helped to cut down on the contentiousness of the posts there? when "naf" used to be at the top above "gct" it seemed like it really was waving a big red flag at the more argumentative posters. incuding myself ;-P so i think this is an improvement for the site.

okay i'm done rambling, your thoughts?

[toodie jane]

Now that San Diego has its very own board, we Californians no longer have to puzzle over the cryptic post titles. And I'm SURE they are happy, too.

Works for me! Seems to be a bit livlier on the California board, lots of new posters, but mostly non-locals starting new threads about subjects that have been covered to death.

What I'd like is a default ***DID YOU SEARCH THIS TOPIC FIRST?*** when starting a new topic. All folks have to do is search the location or topic, and at the bottom is a list of threads already on-going.

PLEASE, search first, then open "new" topic.

[limster]

Tongue in cheek, but:
If you do a search, you'll find that the issue about doing a search first has been raised many times before. Here's one of many examples of an official response: http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/3570...

[Servorg]

lol

What I always "enjoy" is when the inevitable newbie writes "I did a search before posting this but couldn't find any information" and when I do a search up pops at least half a dozen on point results right off the bat....

"You can lead a newbie to search but you can't make them look at the results"

[Naco]

Pretty much the same on the Southeast board. The board is dominated by the Triangle area of NC, with occasional bursts of traffic for Charlotte and Charleston. I really dislike the board division here, because the if any region in the South merited its own board, it was the Triangle.

[meatn3]

I'm in the Triangle of NC. With our area being in SE, the Triangle really dominates, with Asheville next.

On the plus side, the change has seemed to correspond with a recent interest in really getting to know each other through gatherings and a new google(?) group. I attended the first gathering at a restaurant which had garnered a bit of discussion. It was really great to meet people and the event went amazingly well for a bunch of strangers with a shared narrow focus!

Minuses: I personally feel more connected to Va. and Tn., rather than SC & Ga., with whom NC now shares a board. I am also finding I miss a great many voices from the states no longer in my "area". Their removal has created a subtle downsizing of my geographical awareness. For example, Richmond and the Hampton Roads area are easy day trips for me. Since I am not reading about them regularly, I'm not thinking about them as much.
Sure, I could click on their board - but the point I am trying to make is that on some level they just don't feel as close as they did prior to the changes.

Initially I really had strong feelings for a Triangle board. Now I am not as sure. I would miss great reports about areas quite close by - Naco's posts are a perfect example.

Many days I only have time to quickly scan 1 - 3 boards. Often a post I never would have conceived to search for catches my eye and it ends up being incredibly interesting to me. If the focus of the board becomes too narrow I'm afraid I'll miss more and more of these gems.

[Naco]

I take your point on a Triangle board. I hadn't thought about this before, but the geography of the resulting rump would be really odd- you'd have Asheville lumped in with the Outer Banks. Totally nonsensical.

There's also the point that the Triangle is hardly an island unto itself- with the road improvements that have been made in the last decade, my travel time from Greenville to Raleigh has been cut from two hours to a hair over an hour, so we get up that way much more.

Really, it's the sectioning off of Virginia that seems odd to me. A Carolinas+Virginia board and another for the rest of the South seems ideal to me.

[smartie]

I am going to be a grouch about our changes in Florida. We now have a Miami-Ft Lauderdale board where the subtitle says Miami to Ft Lauderdale but it is also supposed to include the northern part of Palm Beach County which is about 100 miles away from South Miami.
However, newbies and travellers don't know this so they continue to post in the Florida board leaving us older CH'ers the job of redirecting these posts to the Miami board. This means we have to look at 2 boards rather than one.

Also, the Miami board has lost the chit chat from us regular CH'ers who used to chime in more often. Also many posters are still titling their posts 'Where to go for breakfast/lunch with a toddler/dinner with granny etc' without saying their location because they are assuming everything is just Miami and Ft Laud.

We don't live in or venture to Miami and I would prefer that CH subtitled the Miami board as the Tri-County area (Dade Broward and Palm Beach).

[nsxtasy]

First of all, I think most of the changes made were excellent and things are working out well. Kudos to the Chowhound Team. However, I think some additional changes could be made to improve things.

Regarding the comments above about Miami, I think the city boards that include a wider area should have been named in a way with that connotation. For example, the old boards were called "Chicago Area" and "Boston Area"; the same thing should have been done with the new boards for Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Miami, etc.

I think most of the boards are working just fine. I think some additional changes should be considered, specifically:

- new boards for specific areas: Detroit and Cleveland should be split off from the Great Lakes board, St. Louis and Kansas City should be split off from the Great Plains board, and the Research Triangle Area should be split off from the Southeast board. Each of these has sufficient posting activity to support its own board.

- splitting the "New York State" board up. It now includes the entire state with the exception of New York City, which means that the suburbs of the biggest city in the country are lumped in with towns in the rest of the state, unlike that of most other large cities. Huh? This board should be split into three boards: (1) Nassau/Suffolk Counties (a.k.a. Long Island), (2) Metro North (Westchester and Rockland Counties, the folks in Fairfield County CT want to be in this and I think this is reasonable, and possibly also Orange and Putnam Counties may be included), and (3) New York State (exc New York City and suburbs).

[jfood]

Jfood is pretty active on both the MSP as well as the Tri-State...oops, the Southern New England boards.

1 - The MSP Board has been great and the activity level has been stupendous, everyone is engaged and it same lots of time in staying current.
2 - Let's take theone positive first in that some great posters up to Hartford are more engaged in the discussions.
3 - The SONE Board without the Westchester posters and restaurants just over the geographic border absolutely sucks, excuse the language. Jfood now wades through Chinese on Cape Cod, breakfast in Wooster, and has NO line of site to places 20 minutes away that are part of the FFD-W'chester county food scene. Without writing any more, on a scale of 1-10, the change is a Negative-8. Please, please, please form a focus group, send out a survey, do something that includes posters out here in a re-vamp of this horendous decision. It's borke, please fix it.

[rockandroller1]

I'm sure many would like to see their area get their own board. I personally think on the new Great Lakes board that it's harder to find cleveland related posts and that there are less posts there now about cleveland than there were previously. I don't think "great lakes" is a very friendly (by friendly I mean by ease, not that it's not nice) way to find cleveland, particularly for new visitors to the site. While we do have a great lake, we don't really identify ourselves that way most of the time. Midwest? Sure. Rust belt? You bet. But Great Lakes? makes me think it's all the states around the great lakes, which isn't necessarily the same as "the midwest" in my mind, and seems like it would encompass more states instead of less. Maybe clevelanders feel like their posts will get lost in the lakes as it's more vast sounding. Dunno.

[meatn3]

Georgia is part of the SE board, with Atlanta having their own board.

I have noticed very few Georgia posts in the SE board since the split. There have been a few Interstate or BBQ related queries (which tend to extend over a region), but not much else.
I thought since Atlanta is flying solo that might be why Ga. is so quiet.

Took a look at the Atlanta posts, and there is very little - 1 to 3 per day tops. Many days nada.
At this point it seems to be an easy spot for visitors to seek advise rather than much sharing between the locals. Both are viable and both have pluses. Personally, when I travel I am much more interested in the local opinion of 'hounds. Once in a blue moon if I'm tied to a conference I might be interested in a "whats good near xyz hotel" answer - but that is so seldom.

At this point it seems to me that having Atlanta separate from Ga. has hurt that state.

[HDinCentralME]

Since Northern New England was split off from Southern (CT, RI, MA) it has been a lot quieter :-). I hope that folks will start posting more about Maine, VT & NH chowworthy spots.

The Snowbirds will return north soon. And of course we will get our share of "Where to get Best Lobster roll?" querys come Summer.

[CyndiA]

I never call or think of my area as the southeast. I think of myself as being from NC, the Carolinas, or the South. I would be most likely to eat in NC, SC, VA and perhaps TN. I have clicked southeast a few times, but I do not see much with it grouped that way that could catch my interest.