Splitting the forum does have drawbacks - virtually all other online forums I've ever seen have gone down that road, and one of the many things that makes the Mudcat so much better is that we haven't.

It may seem tidier all split up, and it can be convenient, but there's a price to pay - I'm reminded of the way libraries these days tend to split up fiction into arbitrary sections like Crime, and Romance and you miss stuff you'd have liked because it's somewhere you never look.

I think there is more to be said for doing it a different way, with consistent use of heading prefixes. Maybe with an extra prefix for the kind of ephemeral "people and events" stuff Geoff was talking about there. Perhaps P&E or Eph. Used along with a regional marker such as UK or NZ.

That way, by judicious use of the "filter" box and the "filter out" box up the top of the threads, and people could sort things out for themselves. When they chose they could set up a screen where all the P&E threads are absent, or just the UK ones - or the other way round, when that's what they wanted.