Is your investing community closing?

It can carry on here — under its own name, with its own moderator, for as long as it wants to. There is no charge, and there never will be.

We know how this goes, because it has happened to us twice. This community moved from A.O.L. to The Motley Fool, and from The Motley Fool to here. Both times the software turned out to be the least of it. What mattered was whether everybody arrived in the same place, and whether anyone was still writing six months later.

The thing that actually decides it is whether your people arrive together. A forum that closes without somewhere agreed loses most of its members permanently — not because they wanted to leave, but because each of them, separately, had nowhere obvious to go and got out of the habit. What prevents that is one address, sent once, while everybody is still paying attention.

You can have that address today. It works the moment you fill in the form, before anyone has approved anything, because a community in this position has days rather than weeks.

What you get is a board

Not a section, not a sub-forum, not a special category invented for new arrivals — the same thing the boards that have run here since the nineties are. It carries your community's name. One of your own people moderates it. It has a front page you write yourselves, at an address of your choosing, which is what you send to your members.

And there is no word for you. We considered several — chapters, homes, partnerships — and dropped all of them. Any special name, however flattering, marks the people using it as a different sort of member. Yours will simply be a board, listed among the others, described the same way.

About your existing posts

An honest answer rather than a comfortable one: there is no button that imports another forum's archive, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not looked at the export your platform will actually give you. If your archive can be exported at all, write and we will look at it together — some formats are workable and some are not, and you should hear which yours is from somebody who has opened it.

What can be said without qualification is that what your community writes from the day it arrives will still be here in twenty years, at the same addresses, readable without an account. Posts on this site from 1998 are still where their authors left them. That is not a policy that could be changed later; it is simply what the site is for.

Your members will not arrive as nobodies

This is usually the real hesitation, and it deserves a precise answer rather than reassurance. Standing here is the Honorary Rank, and both halves of it count the last twelve months only — how well your recent posts were received, and how much of your recent writing was article-length.

So somebody who joins in March is measured on exactly the same twelve months as somebody who has been here since 2004. There is no seniority to catch up on, because there is no seniority. Your best writers will be among the best-regarded people on this site inside a year, and nothing about how they got here will be visible to anybody.

What it costs, and who pays for it

Nothing, permanently. Shrewd'm carries no advertising, has no sponsors, sells nothing, and has nobody on the payroll. It is paid for by members who choose to contribute, which is a small enough bill that it has never needed to be anything else. There is no investor expecting a return, so there is no point at which somebody decides the community should start earning its keep.

Your board is not a trial, a tier, or a plan. Nothing is metered and nothing expires.

Nothing will be taken over later

Your board's name, your moderator and your front page are yours for as long as you want them. There is no rebranding, no absorbing, no retiring and no graduating — not after a year, not ever. Your members are free to read and post anywhere else here from the first minute, or not to, and nothing will ask them to.