Motley Fool Boards free again...sort of

SecondCor521

Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Joined
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Just randomly decided to go register for a free 30 day trial at the Motley Fool and found this on the LBYM board:

"Long live the(free) Fool!!!


Dear Fool Community Member,

In 1994, my brother Tom and I started The Motley Fool with one goal in mind: to provide a trusted source of unbiased financial advice that would educate, amuse, and enrich.

What you may not know is that The Fool was born on a single discussion board. Since that day, we've been committed to building the world's greatest investment community together with you.

Opening our community to the world

Our launch of CAPS last October has made it clear to us that when it comes to harnessing collective intelligence, more is better -- more ideas, more discussion, more people. In that spirit, we are happy to announce that in a few weeks The Motley Fool Community discussion boards will be free once again and open for anyone to read.

There is one exciting twist.

While anyone will be able to read the Fool Community discussion boards, only people that you choose to invite will be able to post on the boards.

When the boards are officially opened in a few weeks, you will notice an "Invite a Friend" button on all folder and message pages. Clicking the button will allow you to invite friends you think will contribute positively to our community. In this way, we are collectively empowered to grow our community organically and naturally from within. Rest assured, fellow Fools, the quality of our discussion boards remains firmly in our hands!

A complimentary gift just for you

As a thank you for helping us build the world's greatest investment community, we will be extending you a complimentary one-year subscription to our flagship personal finance service, Motley Fool Green Light (a $79 value) in place of your current community membership.

Led by long-time Fools and personal finance experts Dayana Yochim and Shannon Zimmerman, Motley Fool Green Light will lead you through the confusing world of personal finance and investing to get you on the road to financial independence.

We'll be sending you a confirmation email shortly with everything you need to access your free subscription. Of course, you'll be able to access the community boards as you always have.

If you'd rather not receive your one-year membership to Motley Fool Green Light, we'll provide you with a refund for your remaining Discussion Boards subscription. Simply email us at membersupport@fool.com.

Building the world's greatest investment community, one person at a time

Thank you for helping us grow what Forbes has rightly called the best boards on the web. If you have any questions at all regarding this exciting new change, please post them on the Community Membership Q&A Board.

We can't wait to meet all of the great new people you'll be bringing into your community. See you on the boards!

Foolishly,


David and Tom Gardner
Co-founders, The Motley Fool"
 
I'm interested. When I was mustering for ER, before Dory's place, I was at MF learning from the likes of intercst. Very Curious to see how it will be there.
 
Fool seemed Foolish to me when they decided to make money on the financial rantings of anonymous sources. User forums should always be free and considered part of the ad or PR budget. Is this like Google invites and everyone that is invited gets invites?
 
Just registered again - 7 years on...

There are now 8 Retirement discussion boards:

FIRE Wannabees
Jimmy Buffet Style Retirement
Retire Early CampFIRE
Retire Early Liberal Edition
Retire Early
Retire Well On Less
Retired Fools
Retirement
 
I was surprised they still had my login active from way back around 97 when they first opened their own site.

I was bummed they didnt still have my original portfolio from back then in the portfolio manager. Would have been a little interesting to see how my investments back then would have done after all these years.

After having a short look around, I saw that the founders portfolios are way, way up!!! XX% since 2002!!!

Good luck with that...
 
I was surprised they still had my login active from way back around 97 when they first opened their own site.

I was bummed they didnt still have my original portfolio from back then in the portfolio manager. Would have been a little interesting to see how my investments back then would have done after all these years.

After having a short look around, I saw that the founders portfolios are way, way up!!! XX% since 2002!!!

Good luck with that...
hey, what was your handle there...I don't remember who I was back then - there or otherwise...:(:rolleyes:
 
Just registered again - 7 years on...

There are now 8 Retirement discussion boards:

FIRE Wannabees
Jimmy Buffet Style Retirement
Retire Early CampFIRE
Retire Early Liberal Edition
Retire Early
Retire Well On Less
Retired Fools
Retirement

Save you some trouble with a spotter's guide:

Wannabees: yunguns
Jimmy Buffett: :confused:
RE CampFIRE: "affectionately" known as "right wing circle jerk"
RE Liberal: Mostly RWCJ a-holes trolling and idiots feeding them
RE: :confused:
RWOL: Ok, but less active and mostly people who don't really have enough to retire
Retired Fools: Old farts corral
Retirement: :confused:

Once they go to invite only, just PM me and I will send you an invite, assuming you really have that much extra free time.
 
Save you some trouble with a spotter's guide:

Wannabees: yunguns
Jimmy Buffett: :confused:
RE CampFIRE: "affectionately" known as "right wing circle jerk"
RE Liberal: Mostly RWCJ a-holes trolling and idiots feeding them
RE: :confused:
RWOL: Ok, but less active and mostly people who don't really have enough to retire
Retired Fools: Old farts corral
Retirement: :confused:

Once they go to invite only, just PM me and I will send you an invite, assuming you really have that much extra free time.
OK. Thanks.
 
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More Fool boards.
Retirement investing: is a fairly serious board where retired "experts" (like Me :)) tell aspiring FIRE types how to invest. Actually not a bad place for financial newbies to get good advice.
Retire Early CampFire: Is the orginal retire early home page, where Dory use to hang and intercst started. It is far more of a social/rightwing political board than a retirement board but SWR and such are still discussed.

Two of the most useful boards are the Berkshire Hathaway board which has some of most knowledgeable folks I have seen on Warren Buffet's company, and the Tax Strategies board, which has several CPA and a former IRS agent all providing terrific advice to tax questions.

Feel free to PM for an invite also
 
More Fool boards.
Retirement investing: is a fairly serious board where retired "experts" (like Me :)) tell aspiring FIRE types how to invest. Actually not a bad place for financial newbies to get good advice.
Retire Early CampFire: Is the orginal retire early home page, where Dory use to hang and intercst started. It is far more of a social/rightwing political board than a retirement board but SWR and such are still discussed.

Two of the most useful boards are the Berkshire Hathaway board which has some of most knowledgeable folks I have seen on Warren Buffet's company, and the Tax Strategies board, which has several CPA and a former IRS agent all providing terrific advice to tax questions.

Feel free to PM for an invite also
Thank you...with 355,000 posts I was thinking the campfire was the original - too bad it morphed, but retirement investing, BH & tax strategies sound like something I could like, just for starters. Thanks for the heads-up.
 
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The campfire board is what used to be the REHP board, but I hear it's mostly political talk now.

Not sure if I'll head back there or not. Might check out LYBM and ATHH if they're still there.
 
Charging for the boards was a really dumb move. Those boards used to be really active and I would imagine the Fool made a lot of money in advertising. The boards are so inactive now that I wasn't going to renew my membership.

The LBYMs board alone used to generate more posts in a day than what they get in several weeks to a month now. It's been dying on the vine.

Having an open board will allow people to cross post links and generate traffic again.

I realized a long time ago to ignore any advice from the Gardner brothers. I think it was the valuations don't matter statement during the high tech boom that did it for me. I'm not sure that was actually from one of the brothers or a TMF staffer's article.
 
When you said "sort of," were you referring to the invitation only aspect? Apart from that I'm understanding that it will be totally free in a few weeks. Yes?
 
I realized a long time ago to ignore any advice from the Gardner brothers. I think it was the valuations don't matter statement during the high tech boom that did it for me. I'm not sure that was actually from one of the brothers or a TMF staffer's article.

Well, I didnt participate in their board back then like a lot of you others, but read their content and yeah, they were pushing b.s. like that...there was some other stuff on index funds, and dividend investing, but it seems after awhile it was just pushed to the curb...yeah, a lot of discussion boards have spawned after people left there....I dont see them putting the genie back in the bottle...
 
When you said "sort of," were you referring to the invitation only aspect? Apart from that I'm understanding that it will be totally free in a few weeks. Yes?

I think the invites start in a few weeks. As I understand it will be freely readable by all, but posting only by invite.

Sounds like a marketing ploy to me. Sounds like they think it'll help their popularity like the GMail invite program did.

I logged in with my old account but couldn't read the boards without doing the 30-day guest thing. What was funny to me was that the announcement and FAQ about the boards going "free" required you to be able to read the boards to view them.
 
Well, I didnt participate in their board back then like a lot of you others, but read their content and yeah, they were pushing b.s. like that...there was some other stuff on index funds, and dividend investing, but it seems after awhile it was just pushed to the curb...yeah, a lot of discussion boards have spawned after people left there....I dont see them putting the genie back in the bottle...

Hard to say. Their site and advice sucks, but the boards probably get a lot of Google referral traffic, and this free launch appears to be twisted in with some sort of Google program from what they said in the announcement. I can see this going either way.

Personally I'm not eager to spend much time posting there...who knows when they'll decide it'll make more money going for-pay again?
 
I found their REIT board to be a valuable asset. A group of posters led by "Reitnut"
(Ralph Block, writer of several books plus "REITWeek") and several others (Jim
Luckett, Gurdison, etc) have gone to considerable effort to educate people on how
to evaluate REITs, their opinions on which have the highest quality management, etc.
I have kept a list of the best posts of the board over the years. Here is the list back
to Sept 02 :

#44142 : May07 : SPG
#43532 : Mar07 : Current Favorites
#43058 : Feb07 : Other companies
#42932 : Jan07 : HST
#42800 : Jan07 : REIT valuations
#42702 : Jan07 : Pick6 for 2007
#42152 : Dec06 : Which REIT
#41720 : Nov06 : Blue Chips
#38021 : Feb06 : Essential REIT
#36443 : Dec05 : Evaluation
#33143 : Apr05 : AVB
#33141 : Apr05 : Malls
#32759 : Mar05 : CUZ
#32492 : Mar05 : Essential REIT
#32239 : Feb05 : GGP
#30878 : Dec04 : Current favorites
#29547 : Sep04 : GGP buys RSE2
#29386 : Aug04 : GGP buys RSE
#27650 : May04 : CUZ
#26096 : Feb04 : MAC
#26013 : Feb04 : ARC
#24159 : Dec03 : Reitnut 04 picks
#23446 : Nov03 : REG
#23293 : Nov03 : SUI
#23108 : Oct03 : MHC recap
#23084 : Oct03 : MHC recap
#22745 : Sep03 : Favorites
#19665 : Apr03 : FR
#19664 : Apr03 : HCP
#19126 : Mar03 : HCP
#18836 : Mar03 : CPG
#18834 : Mar03 : GL + Office REITs
#18832 : Mar03 : CDX
#18434 : Feb02 : AIV, NHP
#18245 : Feb03 : Mortgage REITS
#18240 : Feb03 : Apartments
#18179 : Feb03 : ASN
#17990 : Jan03 : AVB
#17809 : Jan03 : AMB
#17381 : Jan03 : ARE
#17105 : Dec02 : 2003 Blue Chip
#16355 : Nov02 : SKT
#16026 : Oct02 : REIT sector timing
#15958 : Oct02 : Bankruptcies
#15935 : Oct02 : PP, the office sector
#15639 : Oct02 : HCP, UDR, ARE, GL
#15637 : Oct02 : REG
#15593 : Oct02 : Choice Stocks
#15508 : Sep02 : Year in Review
 
When you said "sort of," were you referring to the invitation only aspect? Apart from that I'm understanding that it will be totally free in a few weeks. Yes?

TAl,

Correct.

2Cor521
 
The LBYM message board at MF was the first financial message board I particpated in, and I stuck around until they started charging for it. It will be interesting to see what's up over there once they open it up.
 
I was also on the MF boards and left when they started charging. When I signed up for my free trial I read the LBYM board for a little bit and was disappointed to see that it had devolved into a social chit-chat board with little to no info on LBYM.

I haven't been back since and don't plan to try to get a membership there, free or otherwise.

2Cor521
 
Well the boards are now open by invitation or you fill out a questionaire and they invite you .The questionaire is pure fluff .It's a step up from Are you breathing ? Do you have computer access ? and Do you promise not to troll .
 
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