Cities and sub-forums... is it better to have the city forums as-is, or all moved under one forum?

This is a re-org question.

At the moment we have a number of city forums, more than half of which go onto the next page and therefore are not accessible from the home page.

We now have support for sub-forums, and I could create a forum for local cycling, and move all of the city forums to that.

The pros:

1. All forums will be on the home page
   
2. All forums will be within 1 click
   
3. Once in the "Local Cycling" forum, all cities would be visible in detail and it makes it easier to add more in future
   
   

The cons:

For the 6 affected forums that are already on the home-page:

1. Sub-forums are shown at the level above without the "NEW" marker
   
2. Sub-forums are shown at the level above without the counters (number of items and comments)
   
3. Sub-forums are shown at the level above without the "last comment" information
   
   

So for those 6 forums, people would need to click once to see the detail information per-forum.

I'm sure I'm not representative, but as no-one else is chipping-in...

Grouping the local forums together seems logical now that eg the classifieds are organised in the same way: local forums necessarily have a limited audience and I can't see they warrant the prominence of an individual listing on the home page.

One consideration (from my own experience): if you ignore a "top" forum, that takes precedence over whether or not sub-forums and threads are ignored. So if someone only wanted to see eg Bristol, they would have to ignore each of the other local forums, rather than ignoring the "top" forum and making an exception.

Having said that, this is what you have to do now so nothing is actually lost.

I did this.

I grouped them all.

All of the city/local forums are now on the home page, but you have to go into the forum to get "NEW" notifications.