There may be many, many people who remember MFIF fondly, but I think the lion's share of them remember a much earlier version, and were already long gone by the time MFIF was shut down, driven away by a combination of factors which arose more or less contemporaneously with Ted's sale of MFI to TechTracker:
- the spread of acrimony, notably in the Mac OS X Talk forum, and in the Lounge's political threads in the aftermath of 9/11;
- a severe, more or less ongoing set of technical problems (hardware server troubles, database troubles, ad server troubles, and the constant reduction of engineering cycles to deal with any of the above), whose end result was a chronic interminable wait for pages to load;
- the (two week?) emergency shutdown in the spring of 2008 to update the forums to new software, which was likely the final straw for many who'd managed to weather the day-by-day access issues of yore; and ultimately,
- a dramatic diminution in the quality of help offered, due in large part, no doubt, to the tangible reduction in both depth and breadth of knowledge represented by the diminishing population of regulars.
This steady erosion of traffic may not have been that noticeable to some of those regulars who remained throughout, since even toward the end, there was enough traffic to provide new interest on a more or less daily basis; but to those of us tasked with managing the content side of the site, the dropoff in business over the years was staggering.
When I became a moderator in 2003, a typical day saw around 300 new posts, and that itself was down significantly from the first couple years of the millennium. By the end, we were down below 100 posts a day.
