Mods are doing excellent job here imho. Moving, consolidating threads, etc are the norms for most online forum/community. As a matter of fact, I've been to other forums where they're more strict. lol This is nothing. 
Oh and yes, move to SmorgasBoard please... don't make me press that report button. 
Two outstanding general comments, well threeish:
1) Leaving this thread here, people can peruse it in all it's glory.
2) I don't care about finding out who specifically is ranting, life is too short, and we've never banned anyone for critiquing practices on the forum, why would we start now? The current moderator group is pretty level headed frankly and not prone to lopping people's heads off.
3) Hiding behind some "anonymous" account is dubious at best, and certainly is no way to get respect for the opinion being posted.
That all said, I will give my opinion on what was posted, first as a general forum member, and secondly as a volunteer moderator.
Speaking as a generic user, it is awkward to find information on this forum. The search interface leaves much to be desired, the post volume is high, and things get knocked off the first and sometimes second pages quickly. Lithium isn't graceful in it's handling admittedly, but I'd challenge anyone who's ever been a part of another forum community to find one that handles things differently: information must be sorted into a heirachical fashion (even if it's only one level here) or it simply gets lost in the weeds. I would suggest it's an easy problem to see when Google is better at turning up search results on this forum than the Lithium native one is.
Scrolling through a bunch of congrats/approval/social messages, makes it hard to navigate. I find it difficult to do so and I have plenty of experience on these forums based on my post count and minutes online.
As a moderator: here's a simple request - offer solutions. Saying that we should simply abdicate everything and let posts sit where they get posted, isn't a solution. Give us something better.
For example, it might make sense to split Credit Cards out further, and put anything relating to a CC application into it's own category or toss it all into what's currently labelled CC Approvals, and create a more "social" board with a simple relabling of the board name, and relax the restrictions on what gets posted there rather than having the seperate GAS board which admittedly doesn't work all that well in my opinion. That would leave CC as a more information-oriented forum, and the CC Applications board as the social one since likely 80% of the non-RYC community revolves around people's successes and failures tied to credit card applications.
Another one might be to take the BK board, which doesn't get a ton of traffic, and consider consolidating it with Rebuilding. Or taking the Garden Thread, and sticking it somewhere, maybe in a board with the underserved FICO Fitness Challenge and some other bit here or there to keep eyeballs on it. Or maybe take both of those, stick them in the theorized CC Applications social board, sticky them, and just let them be in the free for all as well.
Business credit used to be more relevant, now I don't know. Maybe that deserves to get folded back into CC's as the bulk of the questions are on business credit cards with hardly anything on other business credit types, especially as the line is being blurred for sole proprietorships and no lender seems to care: I'm getting business card pre-approval messages from banks that never send me offers as a personal consumer and my silly referee income is maybe 10K a year when I'm not quite half-assing it.
Those are potentially constructive ideas: complaining without offering something on how we can make it better is likely to get ignored.
NASA FCU: that whole thing proved cluster was only half a word. Yup, I get people were excited, and maybe there was a better way to handle it, but having the 20+ threads all on the first page to the exclusion of everything else... no. We didn't have time to use the scalpel (especially with people getting legitimately offended over some of the language used, guess which was higher on the moderator priority list to take care of?), and so the broadsword was wielded... and if you note, we haven't been merging more recent ones. It was a knee-jerk reaction to a problem as we saw it, and while it wasn't a perfect solution, by and large it has worked out pretty well: absolutely can't please everyone, welcome to my world as a moderator, choices and tradeoffs have to be made for the theoretical "good of the community."
As for people leaving the forums: yup it happens. If you hadn't guessed, if I weren't a moderator, I'd probably be gone too but it's not because of the moderation practices: people tend to get their information, sometimes stick because of the community (or further interest, I became a CC information junkie for a while), but everyone moves on eventually. This is true of users, CL's, moderators, and Admins; I'm continually surprised at how sticky this forum has been for an admittedly niche shared interest forum. I think it rather suspect that anyone who cares enough about this community to stick around for a while, would simply leave without sending a PM to me or one of the other moderators they know well like Lexie rather than simply taking their ball and going home so to speak. I have a very difficult time understanding that, perhaps it's just my being stupid, but how have we been chasing people away? If we're sucking, tell us, seriously.
Along that point, I fully expect people to transition through the myFICO community, and sometimes move on to different credit forums: they serve a similar function but with a markedly different outlook and what's permissable is different as well... which leads them to cater to a different crowd. No harm no foul there, and I have nothing but respect for CB/FT/et. al even as a moderator - the more people see credit scoring information, the better in my opinion. Is the information here (or there for that matter) 100% correct? Of course not, but I'm not one to throw out the good chasing the perfect, and I think overall this is an excellent community for the function it serves.
Anyway the moderators are just volunteers and we did not write the TOS (hi FICO Legal!), we just enforce them. Things like referrals, that's just spam schilling, so we're preventing individuals from attempting to make a buck or two, seriously who wants that on a forum?
To reiterate in closing, throwing stones without offering even remotely plausible solutions tends to just be griping: welcome to the Internet. If you care enough to actually post the message, then I would suggest you should care enough to offer realistic ideas to improve the forums. I know I can speak for both the moderators and the current Admin staff on this one: we absolutely welcome ideas on how to improve the forums; you as an individual user might not get a vote (and sometimes I don't as a moderator either, hi spam filter funsies) but it will be discussed, and on the whole, personally I think that's a pretty fair way to run a forum.
@Anonymous wrote:Oh, I hate constructive suggestions, but if you insist: How about copying some other boards and create issuer sub-forums. So, General, Amex, Citi, Chase, Barclays, BoA, Cap One and Others (or some such, General for issues concerning ccs as a whole, Others for other issuers not specifically covered) Then at least those interested in a specific question (lets say the email of the Cap One EO!) can start in more focussed forum.
FlyerTalk recently added a Citi subforum (after an extended time discussing if the traffic justified it, but that's them), and the mods could do the same here, deciding if for example PenFed deserves its own forum etc.
Stops cross-pollination, but so does too many posts and an underpowered search feature.
We've talked about this previously, I championed it maybe a year ago for the major lenders, but a lot of our posts happen to cross a lot of boundaries (Amex, Discover, Chase all in one thread for example).
How is it handled there?
@Middleswarth wrote:Another forum I visit has the CC section split into 4 - Visa & MC, Amex, Discover, and Store Cards. I would suggest splitting it like this and maybe even have subcategories under each (maybe CU cards, major bank cards, and local bank cards under the Visa & MC forum for example).
I don't personally think that breaking it up by transaction network works: some cards have historically had multiple transaction networks, and some lenders switch transaction networks too. Further any national bank often has multiple products on different transaction networks, and the common tie is the lender in question. Store Cards and CU's might be two good categories if we did it by lender though rather than a "everything else" forum, that's a good idea thank you.