If it is not too much hassle I would keep it and the most importantly the history. Having just got to the half century myself I guess I am past the median (30 car years to 50 ... only 20 to 70). The difference in communication styles from text/FB/IM etc to Forum/email is marked. On a day to day basis I work in a technical support/design role and my 20-40 year olds I work with get Instant Messages from the field but do not like them, better to get a lengthy but complete question on email rather than a stream of small questions/information interspersed with banter; yes the banter makes life nicer but that can be done at the end/start while maintaining the core question. So there are definitely different roles here for the communication methods.
I would ask that we do not drift too far from current format. The OC forum killed the non official forum (
mx-5-subscribe@yahoogroups.com was technically an email chain not a forum but you could view the threads in a forum like manner) and then started up a horrible in house forum; I disliked it so much due that I stopped participation. I guess that raises the question of what the regional forums are for, as to be honest we could retreat to the national OC forum for such technical stuff. I guess it is the size of the postings you have to dredge through i.e. noise and the likely lack of personal contact that stopped me. Finding local suppliers in Scotland would be a case in point as the 10% Scottish content gets drowned in the 85% English content - the BBC Scotland channel is being created for that very reason. So there are good reasons to keep the Scottish forum.
Now if you want to go all historic on me.. I started on the "big list" for Miatas which used to be 100-150 emails every day which took an hour to download every night over a 14k modem in 1988. I used that to create quithel.co.uk (which is now finally dead after 19 years, 1 million'th rated website in UK!!, Guess I ought to get a new host..but we meantime need to remove it as a Tech Info link on this site as they took down my site (stopped paying them 10 years ago!)). The big list morphed into Miata.net which is still a great resource for research. I drifted over to miatapower.net for a while and still go look at it every 12 months or so. In both of them there are core folk from "big list" days that I know. Fizinidi.demon.co.uk by Graeme Babbs used to have the historic best parts of the UK yahoo list/forum but that has now gone; a pity; I found it in the “way back machine”
https://web.archive.org/web/20040324122 ... mon.co.uk/ but it is pretty big to save. I even found my old website if you need it
https://web.archive.org/web/20140805125 ... hel.co.uk/. I have managed to contact Graeme so I might yet get that info back and maybe it could be hosted as good technical information for the Mk 1-2-2.5 cars.
Anyway that is enough drivel!