The Endless Harmony Forum Celebrates Five Years!

I've had a few people ask me what this means:

"Best posters + best mods = best board. It's a very simple formula, but it works. The numbers don't lie."

Reader's Digest version: when the Pet Sounds board vanished overnight just before Christmas 2018 and Endless Harmony rose phoenix like from the ashes, I decided to keep a running total of the daily posts. Loves me a spreadsheet. Then from February I kept a similar running fix on Smiley Smile for purposes of comparison, and when the Today! forum broke away from EH mid March, that too. So, I've got the daily posting figures for all three major boards since then, and they make fascinating, if sobering, reading. Frankly, over the last four years the posting totals have declined across all three forums by a minimum of just under 30% per board. That said, EH came out top of the pile every year. If anyone would like to see the finer detail, just say. Oh, and I've not included the BW.com forum for two reasons: one, it's pretty much moribund and two (more importantly for me), it doesn't seem to allow a day-by-day search.

Well, people did ask to see the finer detail of the board totals 2019-2023, so here y'go. A small word of explanation in advance, however: while I have a complete set of daily figures for EH for 2019, that data for SS and BBT is, respectively, Feb-Dec and from March 14th, so what I've done is calculated an average.



A further note: SS was down for a varying number of days in 2021, 2022 and 2023, so those years have also been averaged out.

I'm guessing the considerable dropoff last year is largely down to there being no CopEx release and Brian's unofficial retirement from touring. Plus, of course, none of us is getting any younger...

Boo hoo.  The issue with that board is they became a "narrative" and not a "forum for discourse."  There were great discussions and for a couple of years I just lurked and read. I knew it was a shark fest. But, even when I decided to jump in with both feet and not a toe, there was, for lack of a better term, a certain "initiation" where the heavy hitters piled on, to see if you would tread water and stay afloat. That was fully tolerable to me.  You have to earn your stripes in life.  

That said, there was an eroding sense of free discourse, and it became a team/camp issue. It was the blatant abuse of specialists and authors. And if mods did not fall-in-line, they were banned. It was a practical early lesson in totalitarian-style censorship, in a music context, just like Twitter banning, which I found bizarre. And, coming from a background where due process is a cornerstone, there was none to be found there.

At the end of the day, this place arose from their ashes, because the "cream rises to the top" and the "truth will always set you free." It was humbling to start over, but so worth it to discuss, without fear of that level of abuse. The ultimate smack was the lack of confidentiality. My best personal move was insisting that anyone that I needed to have a conversation with, was taken to private email, and not their borderline voyeuristic mods, reading and publishing, what were supposed to be personal messages.   

Thanks to Dirk, Mikie, Alan, etc. for whom, the freedom of discussion of this music, was all worth it, and who soldiered on. The forum matrix was secondary to the openness of the discussion. Again, thanks.  🙏🏻❤️🥇🎶   

What was the reason for the Today board breaking away from here?
Some great posters there, none of whom have had issues with anyone here as far as I have seen, and it is a slight drag to have to check in to a separate place every now and then to see their discussions.