Keith: OMG. You really shouldn’t.
Lee and Keith: Thanks for everything you do.
I’d suggest an annual prize, if and only if funds allow. And Lee, you should never ever dip into your pocket.
With regard to my comment to Keith: the reason I was away for years is because I was out cruising on a yacht. We owners of Amel sailboats kept in touch via an active webforum. This forum was for many years hosted by Yahoo Groups, so there was no cost to the “organization” such as it is. In 2019 it was transferred over to Groups.io. The group remains healthy and all sorts of advice and manuals are freely given. Every few years even a meetup has been organized, and all because of the group’s camaraderie.
What does this have to do with B&O? Well, if you think the B&O market is becoming rarified, how does a French brand that makes less than 100 yachts/yr sound to you? The Amel forum also has no factory sponsorship whatsoever; in fact, Amel has at times competed by making its own but only for new product buyers!
Look, you could preserve the front of the website for membership upgrades and manual library… and push off the forum to a cloud platform. Having the front of the website would help you maintain the search engine SEO. And there is no law saying that you couldn’t extract the “top most-attended posts” and also repost them on beoworld.org as read only as a tool to maintain SEO; users interested in that “headline” section would click thru to the forum.
Around 2013 on the Amel forum there was a proposal to do a self-host like Keith does, and to abandon Yahoo. I supported that idea until I got a little private talk from one of the “elders” that they didn’t want to go with self-hosted precisely because if the volunteers retired for whatever reason, the community would die. I desisted in quiet disagreement but now I see the complete wisdom of these people and am glad they had a foresight some of us didn’t!
Thanks again for all you do, fellows.