Back then, there were few blogs, so most of it had to be here.

Now, every time I visit FT (at least on weekdays), there's several new blogs rotating on the front (and more listed below), many of which seem to cover much of the territory once only found here.

Another factor is that the stragecies that are possible have gotten fewer and at the same time much more complicated. The US coins strategy seemed complicated when it was around in comparison to some that came before, but that was nothing compared to the latest buzz of manufactured spending.

So with specialized and more complicated strategies, you need lots of threads and thus a separate per-strategy forum. And thus you can no longer count on just forum to sanely contain it all.

The other part, which did the last piece of "stripping" this forum, is that almost the only strategies of late were with credit cards, but there were forums already for that, and it was just "littering" this forum in a sense. So it moved. If that's what still excites you, move along with it.