Do you like the new Regional Forum Updates?

It's not the end of the world, but I don't think it was necessary for the Mid-Atlantic and New England forums. In the high density I-95 corridor, there are enough cities and local breweries to keep discussions and beer purchasing fairly tight regionally. No one is driving 6 or 8 hours to the other region regularly to buy beer.

 

It's a bizarre choice really, if anything they should have been further divided into more regions. It's not the end of the world but I think it's a net negative.

 

I have read a number of posts by BAs stating that they will either stop participating or reduce their level of participation due to these changes. I suppose the owners of BA will monitor this aspect. I personally do not think that reduced participation is a good thing either for the BA community or the owners of BA.

Cheers!

 

I'm speaking from the background that I literally was here for 4 years before even knowing another folder existed beyond the Great Lakes forum, recommended to me to join the site by a friend as a good resource for Chicago beer news once I became a craft beer drinker six years ago. It wasn't until COVID that I became a regular participant in WBAYDN and NBW/NBS and participated more broadly across the site. I really liked the other regional forums to plan out of state brewery visits and news.

The primary detriment to condensing states/forums is the fact that many conversations will be lost in the shuffle. If you are a member in a lower population state, you may not see any posts regarding your state into you hit page 2 or 3 beyond a single popular brewery (Side Project, 3 Floyds, TG). Great Lakes already felt Chicago centric to many, especially to folks in Indiana or Wisconsin beyond the FFF, Central Waters and New Glarus discussions, and now there are several additional states contending for attention.

Perhaps @Todd can provide his thoughts as to the benefits and expected outcomes of condensing US regional conversations that many are overlooking (8% voted yes to this poll).

 

Naw, you guys in Chicago talk too much and hog the top of the list of threads. I'm indifferent to that because it hasn't been an issue to look down to the middle of the first page to find the Michigan topics. We'll see if that changes much.

 

I’m the odd one out here but I like how streamlined the new design is, and the more visible incorporation of some of the other threads (subfields?) into the main page.

 

Not a fan of the changes to the NE forum, which along with the WBAYDN thread, was my most visited section of BA. Hope the changes get reverted, so I can enjoy discussing local brewery’s/beer once again, in a cosy environment.

 

My opinion is pretty much just directed at the NE forums since that's what I frequent the most, but I also don't really like the changes. Too much going on with a bit of separation between the users. Doesn't really feel 'local' anymore.

 

I'm fairly indifferent but it follows a pattern of changes here over the last decade & more. A solution looking for a problem. I don't get it.

 

It will likely reduce my participation in the regional forums if only because there will now be even more threads I have no interest in and It'll take more effort to find this ones I am interested in.

I don't understand the logic of this, especially since craft beer has been moving to a more and more local focus for several years. It adds a whole bunch more discussions about purely local beers I have no access to.

 

The NW forum has yet to be assimilated, but we will now be sharing space with Cali, Colorado, and everything west, except AZ and NM. I suspect that we'll get drowned out by SD, LA, Bay Area, and Denver threads that are of no interest to us.

 

Wow, I never realized how dependent people were on looking at the regional forum landing pages. There really isn't a whole lot of activity on that front, at least for an impatient person such as myself. I usually just click the New Posts button and browse thru there. And of course, watch the threads I wish to. It doesn't seem that much more imposing to ignore new posts you don't care about in your "new," larger region.

 

Not a fan of the Regional Forum update its become to cluttered both in the forum and IP trade forum. Not a big thing as lots more going on than to think about this.

 

But, now our new region is going to extend from Nome, Alaska to the Mexican/American border. At that point, why not just make the whole U.S. one big region. The new West region encompasses about 1/3 of the physical U.S: US - West: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming (was Mountain, Northwest, and Pacific).

 

It seems to me that the yearly threads for popular breweries make this change even less useful. It'd be one thing if there were more general "beer talk" style threads in the regional forums that could build a broader community, but as it stands with the dominance of yearly threads for popular breweries, it just clutters the experience since folks that wanted to talk about Tree House or Other Half etc already knew where to go to do so. Personally, I never opened the threads for Connecticut breweries because I never get down there and they weren't relevant to me, this just further dilutes content from my perspective.

The timing is even weirder to me, I haven't driven further than an hour for beer in the last 14 months, this is the most locally minded I've ever been for beer. I see no way that this won't lead to a reduction in my own participation in the forums, passive or active.

 

I dislike this change. I frequented two forums - New England and Northwest. Each is a culturally distinctive area with similar sized populations. Now the 14 million New Englanders have been thrown in with 57 million Mid-Atlantic states residents.

Why?