[Update on July 19, 2008]: The name of the forum changed to Bogleheads Investment Forum. diehards.org domain name also changed to bogleheads.org.
I have been a member of the Vanguard Diehards forum at Morningstar for a long time. People there help each other with investment related discussions. The forum however has a weakest link — it’s hosted by Morningstar which runs a ton of ads on the forum but does not invest anything back to the community. The forum software at Morningstar is the most antiquated I’ve ever used. I have suggested many times in the past that the community establish its own identity on the web rather than bolting itself onto Morningstar. I pretty much stopped posting on the Morningstar forum because I don’t want to produce content for Morningstar.
Finally it took a incessant troll that revealed how badly Morningstar has been treating the community. Some members “had enough” and established a new, independent forum Diehards in the Vanguard [now Bogleheads Investment Forum]. The new forum is ad-free and community based. I have been an early supporter of the new forum. I am the 6th registered user and I suggested a domain name for the new forum. The response to the new forum is overwhelming. Within a week, the new forum has grown to over 400 members and more than 1,800 posts. Many prominent members of the old Vanguard Diehards forum joined the new forum. It makes perfect sense why so many members moved over to the new forum. When you have a choice between supporting a community and supporting a for-profit corporation, the answer is clear: support the community.
Take a look at the new Bogleheads Investment Forum.
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Indexfund says
Great post.
I also like the part (not mentioned in the blog post above) that you made in M*:
When you have a choice between supporting a community owned and operated forum and supporting a for-profit corporation, the choice is clear: support the community. The reasons Taylor mentioned in the top post indicate behavioral mistakes mentioned in the Bogleheads Guide and other personal finance books, namely sunk cost fallacy and status quo bias.
“The Morningstar forum has the name, reputation, history, archives, and a tie-in with The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing. We also cannot forget that M* gave birth to the Diehards and that they were our host at Diehards III.”
Any “debt” the community owed to Morningstar for hosting the forum and Diehards III were paid many times over by the ad dollars the community generated for Morningstar.
indexfundfan says
I made the comment above but somehow my name came up wrongly as indexfund.