<snip>
By the way, there is a symbiotic relationship between this forum and the signature campaign. The forum increases their brand awareness and makes them popular and signature campaigns keep this forum active.
Something that is being overlooked in these discussions is that the forum is privately financed.
It does not rely on # of views or other metrics to produce revenue from ads and that makes paid campaigns a moot point. Personally it would not break my heart if the forum went back to its original mainly
technical content and loses all of the twitter-like general thought-of-the-moment crap like say the Politics & Society section...