Saw this post on Saul’s board from one of the assistant Boy’s room monitors.
{{ In Jan 2026 I had a question about something board-related and I emailed my TMF support person, and even after several follow ups, I never heard back. I made a few half-hearted attempts to contact others including the one supervisor whose email I had…and the second email I sent him came back “undeliverable.” Unknown mailbox. That was in March.
Eventually I came to the conclusion that TMF no longer wanted to support this board. If anyone from TMF is reading this, feel free to reach out if that is wrong. }}
Ya’ll just finding that out. My advice ‘don’t ask for assistance’. You will get chewed out and put on the ‘useless’ list for a week or two until they let you out. Be fore warned.
They don’t make any money from the boards. They tried to charge for board access once many years ago, and lost about half their contributors. I think they regard them as a way to get people to the site where they can try to sell you on their services.
I still remember when TMF was denigrating newsletters and “the wise”, and then they started their own newsletter and other financial advice services. I get that it’s hard to make money in finance if you’re telling everyone not to trust “the wise”. I just found it ironic that they slowly slid into the patterns they were condemning since their founding.
To answer the initial question, we still support the free side. I spend as much time here as on the paid side, probably more. This board gets the most attention these days…before the board conversion Saul’s board took more attention but since Saul restricted the posters and we got all the new moderator tools that prevent all the cussing, lots of the politics and such, that board doesn’t require as much as it used to (Saul requested 2-5 posts be pulled each day before the move to the new boards - probably more). Wendy only seems to have that many a week (although some days are worse than others)
Yep. Once TMF moved to a subscription, pay-for-financial-products model way back in the day, the features of the site that served the old advertising/eyeballs driven business plan stopped being much use to them. But they keep the old free boards around because it didn’t cost them too much to let us old-timers keep talking to each other in the parking lot behind the store.
But they’re not going to invest any resources into keeping any particular board active.
Discussion board is not a profit center for TMF. They continue the tradition but not a major effort.
The recent closure of many active boards is a response to endless griping consuming manpower to respond. Trimmed board requires less monitoring. But mind your gripes. The future could get worse.
Let’s face it, these discussion boards haven’t been profitable since … ever. They launched the Fool on AOL, to be sure, but the era of “banner ads” supporting them ended in the 90’s, and since then they’ve been groping for a way to stay in business. (And very nicely, thank you, with several hundred employees. The paid advice tip sheets seem to carry the load, and they’ve tried other ventures like their own fund and so on, but it’s the paid services that work.)
That said, there may be a small amount of marketing value in having “free boards” for newby investors or people “investing curious”, but based on the traffic here it doesn’t seem to be a particularly large segment. Of course I see no promotion of it anywhere, ever, and on the other hand the costs are almost negligible given that they have to support the “discussion” infrastructure for the paid side, so running a parallel free service is for all intents, “free”. (No insult to Mints.)
[I once participated in a brain-storming/focus panel series hosted by the Fool some decades ago. I, like most everyone else there, was particularly unhelpful in guiding their business forward, and they stumbled, ran, and lurched into the operation that it is today - which is worldwide (of sorts), multi-million dollar payroll, and (for me an others) a gateway to establishing personal financial security, even wealth. For that I am grateful, to say the least.]