I e-mailed Anthony Calfo about this personally and it is indeed a tragedy. This was either brought on by a board growing too big or (more than likely) because some of the administration began to play favorites. All is not lost though for any of us that wish to speak with an expert, after being booted so to speak they landed at Marine Depots forum (
http://www.marinedepot.com/forums/ ). The experts have a greeting at the beginning of each of their forums that explains a little (for the most part they want the incident behind them so they can forget about it) but IMO the main thing is that they are accessable for any of our questions. Here is a little piece of trivia for you, one of the first posts on the thread that was linked comments about getting the experts for nano-reef, this person is basically told that the experts think of nanoers as a sub-lifeform of the hobby. Here is my question: did any of you know that one of the experts is a nano-reefer himself? They have a ViaAqua 18 gallon nano, can you guess which one?
As far as this hurting RC, time will tell. I haven't spent much time on RC for the past year and I couldn't figure out why (it was like I lost interest in the hobby but I foolowed other boards so that couldn't be it) until Anthony mentioned how the "flavor" of the board has changed. I simply didn't feel at home there any longer. Things like them wanting you to pay to ever get access to the search engine and everytime someone asked a question they were told to do a search just made me feel like it was no longer a place I enjoyed being.
On a high note though it has done wonders for Marine Depots board with 778 new members since Jan 1 out of a total of 2,446 members overall.
I am getting off of my soapbox about this now, I feel it was a setback in our reefing community and a shame that things went the way they did.
Yup.