I think I've identified one of the reasons message traffic on a board will die down: negativism. Shortly after Mike Schooly dumped on Rod Gibbons for his views on catamarans and his "sales pitch", traffic on the PUP dwindled to almost nothing. Same thing occurred on the Nordhavn Owners site after Numb Nuts flamed me and then that woman inadvertently flamed a poster.

At 10:22 AM 4/17/05 -0600, you wrote: >I think I've identified one of the reasons message traffic on a board >will die down: negativism. Shortly after Mike Schooly dumped on Rod I don't think that you can draw that conclusion. In some cases the commotion will draw more discussion and sometimes not. The same can be said for topics which are pretty calm. Sometimes the discussion is too calm and the topic dies out. Sometimes due to cycles of the moon and where the nearest restaurant is, will affect whether people stick around to participate and a subject will sputter on or die out. I would not make too much of a medium which is as fickle as email with it's servers that may or may not be working, where spam may be clogging the ISP, where viruses lurk and so on. Regards, Mike Capt. Mike Maurice Tualatin(Portland), Oregon