Flamers made boards die. They achieved their objective. Maybe on purpose? Nobody is going to put up with one or two days of flaming. For what? Now the flamers are also gone looking for next target.
Many of the flamers are caveman types that try to win the argument by torrents of abuse or threats rather than intellectual argument. The one that resorts to these tactics is in my opinion usually the one with the weakest case.
When this board was a little livelier 2-3 years back, a couple of disturbing trends started up that made it less attractive to me : 1. A few crazy forecaster types spamming the board with delusional crap and basically con games. 2. The level of open racism and bigotry increased on certain sections. Neither was very positive to board health in my opinion, but many on here claimed this was not the case. In fact, objecting to either made you subject to deep criticism and being effectively run off this board. I'm pretty confidant that board interest took a hit due to these aspects, but the board owner sets the tone for what he wants on here. I may think one of the moderator's is clearly a racist, but he thinks the guy is a valued part of an investment site, and that the daily content is positive and a good reflection on this community. It's his board, so we are all free to participate or not.
Should we say the fact is nowadays competition is keen? Such as: http://www.meetup.com/London-Systematic-Traders/ http://www.meetup.com/TheLondonTradersNetwork/ This kind of social networking events would highly likely reduce traffic on ET. Perhaps ET should have organised similar events with similar structure starting long time ago.
this forum is suffering today from what others mentioned about a few years ago. the mods and the owner just let a pack of idiots run legitimate traders in the ground and out of here. now i visit back today and its a ghost town with a makeover lol.
I agree. Too much moderation...it's empty;; too little...it becomes not a pleasant place. http://www.Daytrader.com was a ghost town. i'd say less than 1% of the people/posts were normal/genuine people. I just came from http://www.ferrarilife.com/forums/ -- there was also a recent thread there about forums dieing in traffic.