Apropos to nothing, and probably not going to happen, here is how I'd divide up the regions:
The current Northeast with about 70,000 posts is just simply too big. It should basically be divided into two regions. [Change: Split the New England states into its own region and capture all posts dealing with NY and PA from Great Lakes and/or Ohio Valley.]
New England - ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, CT
Northeastern states - NY, NJ, PA
Mid-Atlantic: DE, MD, DC, VA, WV [Change: capture all WV posts from Ohio Valley into this board]
The current southeast is fine, just eliminate some split-states. [Change: Move all LA posts to Mid-South and capture all MS and TN posts from Mid-South.]
Southeast- NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, TN
The two midwest boards should be combined because nobody knows the difference between northern IN and southern IN anyway. KY, which is currently wholly within Ohio Valley can also stay in the Midwest board. (And other than KY every other Ohio Valley state is currently only a portion of a state. How can that stand?). [Change is to combine the two midwest boards and move all posts dealing with MN (to Central), NY (to Northeastern), PA (to Northeastern), and WV (to Mid-Atlantic).]
Midwest - KY, OH, MI, IN, IL, WI.
Mid-South: TX, AR, LA. [Change: Move posts related to northern MS and western TN to Southeast and capture all LA threads from Southeast].
Central: MN, IA, MO, ND, SD, NE, KS, OK [Change: Capture all MN threads from Great Lakes]
The three remaining boards have no split-states and can therefore remain unchanged:
Mountain West: MT, WY, UT, CO, AZ, NM
Pac SW: CA, NV, HI
NW: AK, WA, OR, ID
I guess I'm not sure why every thread in the entire board would have to be reviewed in order to make a change to the board description. Why not just anything with over ~1000 replies or active in the past ~2 weeks? (Again using western New York as an example, that looks like maybe 25 threads at most, and I can tell pretty much at a glance that none would have be moved; I can't remember anything New York-related being posted there in at least several years.)
I completely agree. I, and probably many other posters here, appreciate the hard work of the moderators and staff to keep this forum running. I certainly do not recommend doing something that is insurmountable. If we limit the movement between boards to only the most relevant in terms of frequency and activity, then only a handful of posts have to be moved. And if an old thread about Buffalo surfaces in the Midwest thread, well the moderator can move the thread to Northeast, just like many of our existing threads get moved to Fictional or Off-Topic or other more relevant boards, from time to time.
What a restructuring woud do would make the board structure more useful going forward and would indeed allow for every state to have its own sticky thread.
If I had to isolate one change of highest priority, it would be combining the two Midwest boards. Even if no other work were done to eliminate split-states, that one change would make IL, IN, and OH whole within one board. Included in the merger would be MI, WI, KY, and split regions of MN, WV, PA, and NY. It would also mean that PA would only be split amongst two regions instead of three. The combined Midwest board would have about 58,000 posts, which is still less than the current Northeastern board.
