Impact from the migration to the new forum.

why terrible? Anyone can read posts anyway.

Robots can't. From a private community about gambling BF just became an easily accessible index of "vice".
You'll see quotes from the forum taken out of context or some of the most insane postings used as representation for everybody on here in articles, newspapers and probably even "gambling addiction" research.
Absolutely nothing good can come out of it.

1.01 Layer 01 May 12:48
why terrible? Anyone can read posts anyway.


you have to be logged in to read the forum

Some good can come out of it. If you want to read the forum on a smartphone if you're out and about, it's annoying to have to keep logging in, so I welcome the change.

My mistake, I thought you just had to be signed in to post.

The forums always used to be indexed by search engine, and you also could view them without being logged in.

The fact that they can't today is a real pain as third party search tools such as gubbed will only let you search the forums by title, so finding old threads by poster or by content was not workable.

Betfair only locked them down a year or so ago because of all the bad press they were getting on here every time they stuck their prices up in one way or another.

So personal opinion is that open forums are a good thing.

They were always publicly viewable weren't they? Only changed about a year ago and I don't remember any outrage prior to that. Just shows how people are resistant to change really...no doubt just like all previous forum/site changes, lots of people will say they hate it for the first few days and after a couple of weeks, we will all forget what it looked like before. :-)