The thing is over at American, they didn't have sub forums for the longest time. They were given the ruleset spilt over into the sub region forums that were set for the overall board.
Imagine how crazy that was over there! They had no regions and a setup like Accuweather's forums still are today. I'm sure it got out of hand extremely fast with everyone wanting to talk about their weather in their back yards. People were scared to start a thread. The NE guys used to come troll the SE thread on the main index, and then the Mid ATL and NE used to come troll the SE on their threads. It was absolutely chaotic.
What we have done here is make a forum called SouthernWX. We would love to be larger. We would love to invite any and everyone here to talk about to weather. We still have plans for it in the future, but there are still the problem of if we get too big, do we end up being what AmericanWX is now?
People talk about a couple moderators in the AMWX Southeast section of the site being bad. Imagine if we tried to turn this website into a Conus wide board? I think what happened with American Weather is they went from Eastern Weather to AmericanWX to try and capture that vision of an awesome weather forum for the masses. In the process, everything kind of went to Hell.
Lets be real here. When I type "weather forum" into Google, I see AmericanWX pop up. They achieved what they were after, but they also left a lot to be desired from a lot of perspectives. And no, I am not trying to say we have "overtaken" them in any sense in the Southeast. What I can say, is we try to let everyone have an opinion here.
We aren't a news site. We aren't a forecasting site (yet *cough shane), and we don't try to be powerhouses in our market. We just want people to talk about the weather in the Southeast.
I wish everyone knew how stressful it was to run websites, moderate people (yes it is like a daycare sometimes), and make sure people have a good experience. Hell, I have not even updated our forum software to the newest version recently because I want to make sure people feel comfy here and the theme we currently have is not compatible. (while it makes it easier for us mods and admins!).
Not a single fantasy storm anywhere in sight on any run at any distance. You know that's a bad pattern!
