Thoughts on separate UK accountancy forum?

[Ian]

At the moment, this forum has flag icons for most countries, meaning that we can filter questions by nation. However, the site is very much biased towards UK and USA questions.

I was considering the logic of splitting this site in to separate, but linked, USA and UK sites. For example this .com version would be for USA questions and the .co.uk would be for UK questions.

How would you guys feel about such a change? Would that be an improvement on how things are at the moment? I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

 

[Ian]

This may be of particular interest to @Fidget. I'd be interested in your thoughts

 

[kirby]

Does that mean a USA section which then has the same forums (Accountancy, Tax, etc) and subforums then the same for U.K.?
But what then for folks from other countries?
And then what do you do with the existing message base? Leave as is or try to split it into US and UK?
Given all that you might be better off leaving things as is.

 

[Ian]

It's just a thought at the moment, sounding out feedback - if it's not a popular idea I won't make any changes.

My thought was that I could separate all of the UK threads/posts and place them on to a new, separate website - for example, accountantforums.co.uk (memberships will work on both) - the section names would be broadly similar. The UK-only posts would be removed from here and placed on the UK site. No posts or threads would be lost, just UK-only ones moved.

This site could then be turned in to a primarily USA accountancy forum, perhaps with a "non USA" forum category for a few of the other popular countries (Canada, Australia, India). If any of those country sections grew enough, they could also be split off to their own new domain.

 

[kirby]

Well, really many times I’ve wished the site was indeed split to have a US only section. One reason is sometimes an OP does not show a flag for a country. So I don’t know if they follow US GAAP or IFRS, so I can’t respond because I am US GAAP based.

 

[Ian]

Thanks for the feedback @kirby, I appreciate it. I want to try and do what I can to make things a little easier to navigate.

 

[Fidget]

I think it's probably best left as a single site. If you split it into .com for USA, and .co.uk for UK, then I think what might happen is that anybody from elsewhere in the world will be more likely to post their question on the .com site because they'll think that .co.uk is just UK when it's probable that the accounting standards they're using are IFRS rather than US GAAP.

You could, to get round that, make it clear on the banner for each site which standards are mostly addressed in which site. But, the site as it is though, I don't think gets enough traffic to cause confusion over which standards are being applied, and a fair amount of questions can be answered by any of us anyway because they're not technical enough to require precise application of standards.

Something though, just as an idea. The profile listing has:

* Joined:
* Messages
* Reaction Score
* Country

Is there scope for another for Standards? That way people can put the mention there of which standards they're using?

 

[Ian]

Thanks for your thoughts @Fidget. I do wonder if having the sites merged in to one is a limiting factor for growth, but I think I need to find a way to improve the separation between accounting standards, countries, etc...

It's certainly possible to add another profile field to add experience/standards - that sounds like something that is definitely worth doing.