Has the M* Community changed structure?

[chang]

I only look into the old M* Discuss (now "M* Community") once or twice a year. But I did recently, and noticed that all the old boards are gone (boards = same the ones here on BB: "Fidelity Family", "Mutual Funds", "Boglheads Unite", etc.).

The homepage ( community.morningstar.com/s/ ) has a link to "Investment Forums" (but you have to look hard to see it!); it takes you to this URL:

• community.morningstar.com/s/topic/0TO3o000001yV0JGAU/investing-forums

and this appears to be the only board / page for discussions.

It seems M* has merged all the previous boards into a single page. Is this a prelude to a complete shutdown of the M* forum? No idea. I see only 40 new threads since January 1 of this year, so it does seem to be dying.

[fishingrod]

chang ,

community.morningstar.com/s/question/0D53o00006SL6RiCAL/m-discussions-forum-links

Thanks to yogibearbull

[yogibearbull]

Last week, M* Discussions went private (i.e. became closed). This means that you now have to be logged in to M* to see/read M* Discussion contents, and any M* Discussion links (like the above) won't open for M* nonmembers. I think that M* wants its discussion boards to be just the Q&A for its obnoxiously expensive professional products.

[newtecher]

They should just deliver a coup de grace and shut down the M* forums completely. I checked the latest 10-K and their individual investor product (Morningstar Investor/Premium and newsletters) now bring in only ~2% of the total revenue. Too small to matter.