I dunno. My sense is Audiogon is gonna do whatever they do. This is tail wagging dog isn’t it? They don’t make money from the forum except I guess from advertising?
I think there is still a broad, worldwide audience for this site and occasionally see cross posts from other fora posted here. Somehow, I can manage to navigate through or past the contentious nonsense, but the real loss is a disappeared thread that got "deleted" and had good info until it turned into a train wreck.
My experience with other sites is that the stuff isn’t actually deleted, it is just concealed or "unpublished." But it would take time and effort to go back through those and curate them to restore them without the "bad" posts. And going forward, it requires a degree of moderation that simply isn’t happening-- another user pointed that out to me. That’s why, unless something is completely outrageous, I will not flag a post. And some stuff can go on for pages that is irrelevant to audio. I hate this saying, but "it is what it is."
The culture of a board is made up by its users. The rules or terms of use are really there for the rule abiding in my experience. And it’s been a while since I looked at the TOU but it could be stronger. However, it comes back to enforcement and I don’t think A-Gon has the moderator resources. Perhaps with a clear set of rules and some volunteer mods, they could do better. I dunno. I do know that anyone who volunteers to be a moderator shouldn’t-- kind of like being the hall monitor.