Suggestion for two new forums: Food & Shopping

[aster]

Singapore likes to advertise itself as a country where people adore food and love to shop, so I thought it might be interesting to add two such forums or at least sub-forums.

Food is a no-brainer, it would be great to have a forum where we could post our experiences and tips. Sure there are other websites that rank food outlets, but it would be nice for all of us at SingaporeExpats.com to be able to exchange views and comments between ourselves.

I'm no shopaholic, but a lot of local life focuses on malls not just for shopping but also entertainment, restaruants, etc. It would be good to have a forum where ladies can talk about which malls have what kiddie stores, where the guys can post about special wine deals at stores x & y, etc. Maybe listing the 20-35 major malls in separate topics (stickies?) and allowing for users to start other topics freely would be useful.

[sundaymorningstaple]

Aster, it's a nice idea but unfortunately one that's hard to monitor. We do not allow blatant advertising on this site. The problem then become worse that it already is as we moderators have a devil of a time keeping the board clean of the spammers & advertisers & solicitors (I'm sure you've notice the lack of this kind of crap on this board).

[aster]

Yes, definitely - this forum is as spammer-free as I have seen.

Does the forum offer the technical possibility of only allowing people with >100 posts to create topics in certain forums? For the reasons you mentioned there would be no point in allowing people with just a handful of posts recommending places...

[sundaymorningstaple]

Again, same thing. Sure we could prevent anyone from starting a thread but what is the point? They can still hijack other threads as is so often done. We could have all moderated threads but then that would just make our task harder. We have a single moderated thread that we created a couple of years ago and that one has served us well, but it is for serious discussions and as can be seen there, it's is heavily moderated and the threads stay on topic.

As far as kids discussions go, we do okay with the Parenting/Families/Schooling threads. There are ample discussion there about baby photogs, baby/infant/mothercare shops etc.

If you want a list of shopping centres, there is a good link in my links page in my signature (has almost all the shopping centres in Singapore as well as some direct links to others as well as a multitude of other useful links.

The guys? They usually head to the Computer, Internet, Mobile Phone & Electronics forum (we don't need a forum on Geylang I don't think. But the boys will already know which forum to go to for info there. Most else is handled by the leisure, entertainment threads (restaurants fit in nicely there.).