This is not a new conundrum, but the migration to the new discussion platform has raised it up in my mind again. How should we make sense of the distinction between company tags (formerly boards) that are for Premium users and those in the public boards (Stocks A to Z)?
I think I understand the history (though I wasn’t there for it) that led us to this point – where each service maintained boards for companies it recommended, and then it was decided to merge them as general Premium boards so that members across services could share company-specific insights. But that leaves the public boards. As an example, AMD is a recommendation and has a Premium board with very little activity (11 posts since being created in September 2021). On the other hand, the public board is massive, with 185,000 posts going back more than 25 years! I didn’t even realize this until today. Conversely, many recommended companies don’t even have a public board, and I imagine there are many others with a situation intermediate to these.
This means that if I want to discuss a company, I need to either
choose to post it on one board or the other, losing out on the community in the other place
duplicate my post, resulting in needless spam for people following both and disconnected conversations in response
Given that anyone can tell a company is recommended by a TMF service (it can be inferred from the disclaimers in public Fool articles), and also that in the Premium boards we’re forbidden to discuss specifics of service recommendations (because they’re visible across services), is it time to retire Premium company tags and have all company-specific discussion in the public boards? I’m not sure I grasp the logic of having separate company boards for premium and public users.
If not, how should I resolve the dilemma in where to post"?
Thanks for the feedback @Softie - something we are considering is adding a link for premium members to toggle between the free and premium sites when a company tag is selected that exists on both sites. This should allow premium members to easily follow conversations on both sites. Since the premium site is restricted to paying members the conversations will need to be separate unless we merge them together as you have pointed out in another topic.
The premium boards exist so that premium members can discuss recommendations without divulging that information to non-premium members. There is much more detail to a company’s recommendation than just the fact that a company has one, for example timing. It means something much different that a company just received a new rec than just the fact that it was recommended at some time. Premium members need to have a place for these discussions.
I much appreciate Motley Fool’s support of the free boards. I think the vitality of discussion on the free boards adds to the community and the diversity of opinions offered is valuable to all of us investors.
It’s of course a little bit of a pain, but timing can also be discerned from the public articles, by looking at when a company began appearing in the disclaimer.
Everything related to the actual content of the recommendations – rationale, risks, even the name of the service – is verboten on the premium boards. That leaves only the existence and timing as non-secret, and again those can both be constructed from public information.
So I’m still not seeing why premium members need a separate discussion area.
The premium company discussion boards have compensated ticker guides watching over and providing quarterly reviews, and other updates as appropriate. It is a resource for paid members.
And, while we discourage folks from discussing service recommendations, they aren’t as against the rules as they used to be.
They absolutely need to add a link at the top to toggle between Discussion.fool and community.fool. I cannot think of a good reason why it doesn’t exist.
I’m currently a premium payer but also frequented the old TMF “free” discussion boards. Why are there two seemingly totally disjoint places for discussions? Is it just the difference between “premium” content and free? Frankly, I never even knew there WERE premium discussion boards!
[ EDIT: how/why this posted twice with two different subjects I have no idea. I did get a failure the first time I tried to paste in the image, so perhaps that has something to do with it. ]
Here’s what I see starting from two different URLs (my id is g0177325):
Hi…several reasons, mostly around subscription setup and security. But there have always been boards behind the paywall and ones in front. The company discussions on the Premium Site have Ticker Guides who help following the companies. there are a few others that TMFVicki pointed out yesterday on the thread I’m about to relocate your post to…Distinction between premium and public company boards (tags) - #5 by TMFVicki
Either later this week, or sometime next, they’ll be adding a button to the top right of the premium pages to toggle over here, just like there is one on this side to toggle there. It couldn’t be added until this site went live but it’s in the works.
