Local Forums?

Wondering about the likelyhood of creating local forums, like mountain, east coast, west coast, central, and so forth.

That would help members here get together with other members and set up mini-meets or whatever.

I also created a cool logo for the site, if you want to use it, LMK. It is scalable, and it can be set to open the home page like the current one does when clicked. Since I can't post swf here, email me for the file. DrFoster@medscape.com

Local forums is not a bad idea..... let me put some thought into it, and maybe some suggestions on 'area' as I would figure we might want to narrow it a little tighter.

As to the logo, I did recieve the one you did.... and havent had a chance to review it much yet. I wonder if we would be better using a deuce for it though

Robert and I were discussing this over the weekend. This 'local forum' or 'regional forum' could also be a great place to set up some sort of 'swap meet' in your local area. I do like going and reading salvage yards forum.

But none of them appear to be in my area. There is one down southern Colorado way, but I have not been to that one yet...

What do you folks think? Not trying to 'split us up', just trying to give each region it's own flavor as it were...

I edited the post to have a Poll.... I am leaning toward the last choice?

I'll do one with a deuce too. Give me a little bit to work on it.

not everybody has a deuce, theres a lot of 5ts out there, not to mention , m37s, all kinds of military jeeps, a few tanks, 1/2 tracks, ect,ect. but if you all have to have a deuce logo, i could live with it i guess

mangus580 said:

I like this one better actually... best almost

Click to expand...

YEAH! Rocky Mountains and then everywhere else!! LOL!

Of course we probably have the smallest numbers, given our population in the area noted is smaller than say California or Texas alone. jim

it would greatly increase the possibility of mv get togethers, as well as swap meets. i would almost bet that it would also help to spread the word out about the web sight.

I like the idea i am new to the MV interest but love it. I would really like to meet and see some of the vehicles of fellow members in area. Hopfully my wife will give in soon on the M35 i want.

Personally, I would like to see the forum keep getting posts from all members and not split up. I think a member locator map combined with a place that each member could enter all the members within a certain driving distance of his location so he could PM or bulk PM them for help with parts, looking at vehicles or for getting together on a weekend would be helpful. If each member had his (or her) own network of members within a days drive the country would effectivley be covered with overlapping circles and it would make it easy to move goods anywhere. Just find the member on the map closest to what you have to move, contact him, and then it would move "circle to circle" as it were until the goods got to their destination. Might take some time but would save lots on shipping and help keep things reasonable. Right now with just the few members here in NE, we could move a crate engine from say Towerguy 1 in Me. over into NY state or down to Conn. easily in 1 day or certainly in a weekend. From there the next "circle network" could take over and the engine would be on its way.

boat, the idea here, was just to hvae an area for the different groups to talk about get togethers and so forth...

and I am still working on that map!!

How about a topic like "regional get togethers" and in the subject line, you could have something like "cookout @ BFR's house, North Ga, 17-February" and then anyone from that area could click on it and read the link and all those West Coast guys could ignore it......

Trust me, you do NOT want to split up a forum of this size. It tends to "polarize" people to their area and it cuts down on overall participation. You only want to split it up if regular traffic becomes overwhelming in the popular forums. As it is I think we have more than enough diverse forums to keep everything separated and a lot of forums go unused for the most part. Keep it all together for now and as stated above, someone can post up a gathering with their location, or road trips etc. If it were split, some regions wouldn't have enough members to support regular traffic. Trust me, I have been a part of many, many forums and some are divided into over 30 regions. I normally fall under the Mid-Atlantic region and even for a small area there are at least 1,000 participating members. When you are dealing with those sort of numbers, you are looking at roughly 15k-20k members visiting and posting in a day. This can lead to a forum having 2 or 3 pages of new posts since your last visit the day before and makes it a pain to keep track of. Until we get that kind of growth, I'd keep us all together. It's more personal that way and I think that is what makes this site so cool. With the friendly, helpful atmosphere we have now, we will attract many more members than if we split things up. Just my .02

There are different forums here on Steel Soldiers? LOL I just use the recent post menu at the bottom of the main page. Rarely do I go into a specific forum. My opinion is to keep the forum as is. I also have to give much credit to Mike for keeping us at the forefront of the roum world. I would have left it a basic forum but Mike had ith insight to add the chat which is a wonderful tool and the new chat with fileshare is just the bomb. We are most certainly the premier MV site in the internet. There are still the specific forums such as the Powerwagon Advertiser and G503 but these are specific vehicle forums. I'm really hooked on this forum.

I agree that maybe there are too many forums already. Just look a the most recent posts in each forum and you can get an idea.

I do the same. I like checking all the new posts. I read the recent post part on the main page.

Steel Soldiers rocks, very informative, a great resource and highly amusing...

The member locator map that is being worked ,will be the best.That way we are not "split" into regions but when we want to have a get together or move parts we could look at the map.
As far as Steel Soldiers being the premire site on the subject .........There are others???????????

i read the new post, spliting the site to regions will turn into a mess, though anybody from anywhere can post asking if menbers are near then go from there