But in your proposed umbrella website, most of the readers won't know about the old MacFixIt. And most of those who do haven't returned to it -- hence the current problem for FTM. I think that helpers at the old MacFixIt and the current FTM are great -- but since most of the users of the old MaxFixIt have not returned to FTM, you have to suppose that they were not that impressed -- or just don't know that FTM is the old MacFixIt. In the latter case, better advertising will help.
I'm inclined to believe that there are still many, many people who remember MFIF fondly...that the dearth of posters at FTM results not from lack of interest or from its failure to have made an impression, but from people's, including most former MFIF posters, not knowing it exists.
True, there was a "
get out the word" campaign (mostly in the form of sigs, though, which probably escaped the notice of many) during MFIF's twilight days, but that only reached a small percentage of posters, and the early Google hits that mentioned FTM and MFIF in the same sentence have long since sunk to the bottom of the page.
Also true that there was some early "unrest" at FTM that probably alienated some people, but that's ancient history, and I have to think that FTM's still being around after two years will prompt those people to give it another shot and discover that it's survived its birth/growing pains...that it's a much friendlier, happier place than it was waaay back then.
That said, what better,
and less expensive, way can you propose to get necessary exposure than to be affiliated with a website
whose entire audience is FTM's target audience?
Advertising is expensive, and an umbrella website seems to me to be the cheapest access route to the largest target audience, particularly in view of tacit's assertion that all the free-standing forums are losing business (and [extrapolating here], therefore, could, presumably, use and would, presumably, benefit from the exposure).
