Sheep forum?

I'm generally supportive of the proposed new forum/sub-forum and think it could well indeed work and generate more 'sheep' discussion, but some things need to be borne in mind:

I've done a quick countback, and I see a rough average of 1 'sheep' thread per page. 20 posts/page, so approximately 5% of threads have a sheep-specific title.
These are surprisingly similar to the forestry-thread numbers we were looking at almost 2 years ago, prior to the creation of the Forestry forum.
While far from being a hugely busy forum, the Forestry forum has been a modest success.
It's getting approximately 4-5 posts/day and 1 new thread/day, which is a lot more on the subject that when it was in the general Farming forum.
I suspect that 'sheep' discussion would similarly increase if it had its own space.

Bear in mind though, that the Farming patch here is just a tiny corner of the whole Boards.ie website, and the admins and site managers are looking at a much bigger picture.
New forums add workload to the hardware, software, and personnel of the site, so they need to shown to be potentially of benefit to the whole community.
The raw numbers above by themselves do NOT make a case for the creation of a new forum; they are far from overwhelming and 'sheep' subjects in are no way threatening to dominate the Farming forum.

In order to have any chance of success, the forum proposal needs to make a good case that 'sheep' discussion is being drowned out at the moment, and would expand and grow if it was focussed into its own area rather than falling through the cracks in the fast-moving general discussion in the main Farming forum.


I'd also urge everyone to make themselves familiar with the Forum requests Charter and procedure BEFORE posting a proposal or reply.