I thought the Chicago forum gave the SDMB an identity. The Straight Dope Column is tied to a Chicago paper
(Chicago Reader ). There seems to be a lot of board members from from Chicago. A forum for the home team was a nice gesture.
I know it was a low volume forum. But, I think the SDMB has lost a piece of its unique identity and culture with this decision.
It’s the small touches that gives a home its character.
Is modding a forum with only a few posts a month that big of a hassle?
I disagree. Dead forums make a site look abandoned. To attract new members (and I think anyone who was here for the “pay to post” period will agree that we need new blood on a regular basis) we have to be active and, as importantly, seem active. SDChicago and Barn House detracted from that.
We need a soup forum. I know we have Cafe Society for food threads, but a dedicated soup forum, where we could talk about different kinds of soups, our favorite soup ingredients, where you can order mail-order soup from, etc, would be tits.
They weren’t all that dead.I saw loads of spam in both. 
There were several regular Chicago posters. I assumed they were associated with the paper in some way. They have been absent for awhile.
I’ve been on boards with soup forums and they are always dominated by tomato soup threads, I think we would need a separate forum just for tomato.
No association.
I was on one of those, and it was dominated by gazpacho. Anything about hot tomato soup was overwhelmed. It really needs to be split into hot and cold.
What about chilies and chowders? Are they close enough to “soup” to fit under the umbrella of this new Soup forum or will we need some kind of a sub-forum for these.
I used to post, like every 6 months or something, in the Chicago forum. So I did my part.
I think it will be fine to leave all the soup discussion in Cafe Society, but it would be helpful if each of those threads could have a [SOUP] tag in front of the title.
/too soon?
Hey, I used the Chicago forum a lot! I’m going to miss it. I’ll especially miss all the nuggets of wisdom from Mr. Downtown.
maybe it’s worth stewing about.
Which wouldn’t have mattered if they were kept as sub-forums. 
Ok. I got nuthin then. I thought there had to be something deeply personal and special to create a forum dedicated to one city.
If theres not, then I totally agree it was a third wheel. Unneeded.
It was a business decision by Creative Loafing when they owned the Reader, with the prospect of opening similar forums for other CL cities if it took off. It didn’t take off.
I must admit to some bemusement that a poster from Arkansas felt that a Chicago-focused forum added identity to the SDMB. You read it, and participated in it, I guess.
I posted a couple questions about Chicago. The one about the historic stockyards yielded quite a bit of personal information from local posters that knew that area.
I didn’t know the history behind SDChicago. My over active imagination filled in too many details to fill the void. Thank you for clearing that up.
Mr. Downtown is a buddy IRL and one of my dreams is to build something around his vast knowledge of Chicago and cities in general.
But does he know anything about soup?
Can we please drop the Soup stuff? This is a very serious thread where we are mourning the loss of a great forum that everyone loved.