jayeff

An admirable sentiment, but isn't the format of GFY - whether deliberately or by accident - a recognition of the reality that these days, relatively few webmasters contribute to any of the boards unless they see a chance to spam something?

Some with a specific focus, like TNB, AWI, GG&J and (until they all died) a few AVS boards stayed useful for longer, but most of their "business" threads have become the same (mostly newbie) questions being asked for the umpteenth time.

In the early days of Ynot, industry issues were constantly being discussed openly by people from all levels of the business. Maybe that was because back then there was an unconscious recognition that everyone was feeling their way, but now people are so anxious to guard their "trade secrets" you often cannot get a straight answer even to a purely technical question.

As webmasters became less willing to exchange information, activity on the boards slowed down. Someone came up with the idea of encouraging posters by allowing promotions via sigs and that worked in terms of its primary aim, but the amount of bullsh*t went through the roof. That made the business (and the simply entertaining) threads harder to find, which turned off even more of the webmasters who weren't either generating the BS or its target. Now we are in a vicious circle and the ratio of BS keeps increasing.

GFY is the logical result of that cycle. You can read what you like into what it says about our industry that GFY is so successful while many other boards are in decline...