Itsallaguess wrote:mc2fool wrote:Ah, but the financial side becoming less significant is not the same as it dying.
You have given a reason why some non-financial type posters might come but not a reason why existing financial type posters might be leaving or posting less.
Because the regular tone of debate generated by the very heavy dominance of political arguments sadly turns the site into one where
aggressive point-scoring one-upmanship is a much higher priority for those with the most to say on those political subjects, over and above the original remit of the site, which was primarily and originally a '
Shares, Investment and Personal Finance Discussion Forum', and I think that's more or less where Dod came in with his opening post on this thread - it is simply not now '
what it says it is on the tin'....
The idea of broader topics shouldn't be a problem in theory, but when those broader topics become heavily dominated by aggressive point-scoring, and point-scoring posters who then dominate the site in those political areas, then there's a general bleed-over right across the tone of the site that's really quite difficult to miss, in my opinion, for those of us who have been here long enough to witness the transformation in tone of what
used to feel like a much more welcoming '
finance-community' based forum....
Sorry, but that's funny! I'm not laughing at you, IIAG, honest 'guv, but you have given me a good (natured) laugh, as methinks maybe your memory is a little faded....
The
aggressive point-scoring one-upmanship is not new to TLF -- it came across from TMF with many of its practitioners, most of which are still here today.
Have you forgotten
The HYP Wars? It was a good part 'cos of the
aggressive point-scoring one-upmanship on the TMF HY boards that I gave up following them long before I stopped running a HYP. That "tone" was present there, and in several other
finance boards long before TLF, and migrated to it.
And then there was
The Brexit Wars, that happened on TMF and was
aggressive point-scoring one-upmanship on steroids! I gave up reading that TMF board too, pretty much in disgust 'cos of that. What you describe is not new and certainly wasn't ever limited to just the political areas.
Look, I genuinely have no idea if the finance side of TLF is dying, or whether it's just a perception from a snapshot look at Quick Links (did TMF have an equivalent, I don't remember), hence my call for data. And then even if it is I'm not convinced about the reason (I still go for my "stand alone site" theory.)
However, if you guys genuinely believe that having the mix of financial and non-financial boards in the same collection of boards, i.e. under the same homepage, is detrimental to the financial side, then
I will support you in requesting that the owners split the site.
I'm not familiar with phpBB configuration but I suspect the easiest, and almost certainly the cheapest, would be to keep (just) the financial boards on
http://www.lemonfool.co.uk and have the non-financial ones on, say, nonfin.lemonfool.co.uk ... or some other better named sub-domain!
Why don't you put together a proposal and put it forward as a poll, then present the results to the owners (ok, they'll see anyway) and see what they reckon? As long as your proposal is a split and doesn't disadvantage either side, I will vote for it.