Forums seem to have phases that they go through. First they start off small and tight, and generally unknown. Some people post and share ideas, but overall there isn't enough of a critical mass to attract a wide audience of serious minded individuals. This is the embryonic stage of a technical forum, and quite fankly, many simply never move beyond this point. AMDMB.com water-cooling forums would be a good example.
Usually it takes a catalyst of a number of individuals who are actively promoting and pushing the boundaries to draw in other like minded enthusiasts, and here's where a particular forum starts to blossom. Through a high concentration of experienced people, even the noobs get brought up to speed fairly quickly, and overall the general level of "clue" gets raised. This is the golden stage of a technical forum, and is where somewhere like Procooling sits right now.
Critical success seems to start an eventual path towards a darker end though. Gradually the forums will gather respect for being a place where people can go to get the right answers . This draws in new members, and the experienced members work hard and almost tirelessly to bring them up to speed. This effect snowballs as new members arrive, and the overall level of clue starts to drop. Eventually the experienced members are left to spend much of their time correcting members, or perhaps even correcting old mistakes that get regurgitated up again and again. This would be the plateau phase, where the influx of new members is pushing the boundaries of the experienced members to maintain the level of clue attained in the golden stage. Nothing much new happens though because everyone seems to be learning/teaching, rather than exploring.
After a while, it seems like that this is how all that one's time at a forum is spent, rather than spending time on the hobby that they enjoy, which is learning and expanding and exploring new frontiers and approaches. Eventually it ceases to become fun to repeat oneself again and again. So the experienced members tend to withdraw because nothing much new really happens, it's just a whole bunch of new keen members who need to be brought up to speed, who keep regurgitating the same misconceptions again and again, and the forums are left with mostly acolytes to run the show, and maybe a few experienced die-hards, but overall, not enough to counter the in-rush of clue sucking noobs. Net clue starts to plummet, nothing much new happens. This is the decline stage. This is basically where OCF is at right now.
Over time even the acolytes and the die-hards leave, and the forums start to degrade into a set of self-styled know-it-alls who know a lot less than they think, educating noobs who run out and spread misconceptions. This would be the poisonous stage. Quite a number of smaller technical forums seem to make the leap from embryonic to this stage without going through the middle three stages. I won't name names, except to say that my membership was revoked at one such forum because I dared to contradict a self-styled know-it-all who was moderating the forum.
OCF is like being a grade 9 teacher at high-school. Sure you can continue to teach and teach, but every few months it seems like everyone is back at grade 9 again and the teaching has to be done all over again. Teachers get paid though...
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