The Question and Answer Board

[Churak]

Perhaps "troubling" was a bit too melodramatic. I don't want to rain on Matt & your parade re the SI acquisition cause I think it is a great coup for you both & kudos to you both but, since you raised the issue...

On the one hand you & Matt have stated that you would like iHub to get back to being dedicated pretty much strictly to a place where investors can come to discuss "investing".

In this post you state that I'm not keen to throw free members into the boards that people have paid to participate in, free from the conduct that sometimes comes with free members. I'll figure it out.

http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=18952383

Well, if the stock boards are available to all posters including freebies and making non-stock boards available only to premium posters, you are not discouraging non stock talk by freebies on stock related boards. You would think that you would want the non stock chatter away from the stock boards & therefore the opposite should be true. ie encourage the freebies to post on the non stock related boards. I can tell you, that when my board was created, you had 12,000+ posts in less than 4 months on a free non-stock related board that would have otherwise cluttered up a stock related board. And not one non deleted post nor one member who ended up in JAIL nor one ADMIN problem because of that board. Oh sure, you could say that those 12,000 posts would never have happened on a stock related board but the fact remains that 99% of those posts were made by people who paid for lifetime memberships (acquired during the MDC I might add). AND they paid to post on that board. Now that board has recently been moved to the PREMIUM section of iHub. The rules were changed. Fine. I told MATT it was his & your site & I would not argue with you guys (much to the chagrin of some) about policy changes that were applied uniformly. That is the problem...the decision to move to the FREE section all non stock related boards where there was chit chat was not applied uniformly & Matt knows to what I am referring.

On the other hand, you state that the interest in RB is for their posting history and all the communities there. Investing is only part of the RB community. It is the Clubs & non-stock chatter that makes a board a community. It is like those Communities are separate planets in the RB solar system with RB as the "Hub". That is how I perceive iHub as the centre of all the Communities both stock related & non stock related and, IMHO, each are as important as the other.

It also appears that I am not alone. For edification:

http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=18952736

http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg.gsp?msgid=18953177

I just hope that your ideas & the plans thereof are not etched in stone re the non stock related boards.