Over the years there has been some discussion as to whether or not we should have forums for each individual state and province. It may be time to bring that up again

I am thinking of setting up sub-forums for each province with the idea that it may attract more Canadians - both agents and the general public to AgentsOnline.net. Having members of the public from Ontario for example asking questions to Realtors from Ontario may lead to some business for the Realtors involved.

What is your opinion on this?

Should these provincial forums allow listings to be posted? If so, should FSBOs be allowed? Having a FSBO in your area posted here may not be a bad thing - there is the opportunity for a listing...

What are your thoughts?

If we do set up forums for each province and it all works out well we would probably do the same for each state in the future.

This may not be a bad idea, but this particular sub-forum isn't seeing too much action right now... it may be a good idea to wait to create sub-forums when the main ones are really busy - that would help people who are looking for local information...

As for non-realtors, it seems that the value of this forum is in professional advice/opinions/interaction. While there might be value in having non-professionals here that might really dilute this forum, and make it harder to moderate due to numerous discussions on the value of even having a realtor...

Thanks for your comments. The dilution issue and the spam issue are the reasons we have never set up individual province and state forums in the past.

Have you tried incorporating captcha or something of the sort to prevent the spamming? A forum I run has a lot of issues with spammers registering, but I closed the registration, and only allow people with reasonable e-mail addresses/user names to register (not just the ones with a random collection of letters for a user name)... it is definitely more work, but we've had no spam posted (except for deliberate ads by real live people, which I don't allow). If I'm not sure in a registrant I do a quick search online, and 99% their e-mail comes up under some sort of "stop forum spam" heading... I do need to update the software for my form, and start using captcha, but I have localization issues that prevent me from doing it without investing close to a week of programming in it, and I just don't have the time for that right now :(

Spam is not so much of a problem now - which is one of the reasons why I thought it may be time to have another look at the individual province forums idea again.

We do use a captcha for registrations and since 30 posts are required before links can be posted we are not so attractive to spammers as we once were. Also, I have a large number of IPs from spammer countries blocked

I know that I've been trying to get every new Canadian member to post in this part of the forum for awhile but this section is fairly slow.

If you created 13 subforums (10 provinces + 3 territories) you would probably end up with a lot more dead sections (like wise if you added 50 states). I would recommend starting off creating one for Ontario Listings, since there seem to be a lot of Ontario members and maybe 1 other province to start?

Note: I would have no issue with FSBO's posting a listing.

Thanks for your input. That was my thinking as well the last time this idea came up for discussion (a few years ago).

At that time I was willing to set up individual forums as demand dictated and as long as someone from that particular state or province was willing to moderate the forum.

This time around I am thinking that having a moderator would be nice but may not be a necessity.

I do like the idea of only setting up forums for the more active provinces and states initially.

It would be odd to set up a separate section even for Ontario, as this section is practically dead... there's a post every 3 days or less, and very few replies... plus, how many Canadians who are not from Ontario on this board?

btw, the spammers are generally bots, it's usually not real people sitting and writing posts, so they don't care about the limit... even in the past few days there have been posts with links (yes, links didn't show up properly, but they were still there), so the main thing you can do is affect the bots' ability to register in some way...

btw, the restrictions on actual new members make it very hard for people to participate, I've been on here for almost 2 weeks, and I haven't been able to get enough posts to be able to quote properly... I don't want to post random stuff (i.e. saying "hi" to everyone who joins), that won't add much value, but when I see 2 or 3 posts that are interesting or to which I can contribute, I have to watch the clock or to remember to come back and post later :blush:

We pay for the right to post listings through our board fees.
Prospects can see my listings on my site or thru any agent or on MLS.ca

Having additional listings posted IMHO is unneccessary and a duplication of existing systems.

huh? the discussion was about adding more sub-forums on this board... it has nothing to do with any sort of listings on MLS...

Real estate forum is less active compare to forum with other topics, thus I believe open more sub forum will not add any value to the members!

If there was more activity they sure set something up for the more active provinces but for a post every two or three days hmmm not really worth it. Maybe set up some new little icons for the main thread part have a ON or NF something like that so you know clicking on the thread its talking about ON 'Ontario'

I don't think the Canadian real estate section is active enough to merit it's own subsections.