Well, since this has become a popular thread, I will add my opinion. Personally, I don't think PF is dying at all. In fact, I think right now it's the best I've ever seen it. I can post a question on virtually any topic and get a quality and authoritative answer within hours or even minutes. What else can you ask for?
Also, as I said in an earlier post, PF has been a kinder and friendlier forum (for what reasons I don't know and, frankly, don't care) since the switch over to the new interface. So I feel more comfortable contributing here. In the old days, I felt like the mentors here dished out infractions and bans like UNICEF hands out bottles of water in disaster areas. And these always seemed very capricious to me, like they were summarily executed simply by the caprice of one individual without any consensus among the staff or otherwise oversight.
I don't know if that's changed or not, but I feel much more comfortable again, today, contributing to the forum.
As far as the issue of closed threads, to be honest I really don't care if someone closes my thread or deletes my post. If the staff isn't enamored with my wisdom, I'll find somewhere else to publish it
As far as the harsh attitude of mentors, science advisers, and otherwise senior members toward newbie questions, I don't really have a problem with that either. Science is serious stuff and nobody's doing you any favors by sugarcoating anything. Back in the early days, I used to submit papers to journals that I labored for months or even years on only to have to wait 3-4 months to get a harsh response that may have been only a paragraph or two, much less than you'd get here. So you're getting off easy here by only having to wait an hour or two.
Why do referees in journals seem so harsh? Because referees don't get paid to do what they do (typically). And they take what they do very seriously. Or else they wouldn't do it. So if they get a paper that they feel the author has sent in prematurely without having been adequately proofread or adequately referenced with the standard rigor that they, themselves, had to be held to when they submitted a paper, they tend to get VERY cranky. Case in point, I recently reviewed a paper where almost a third of the in-text citations were not included in the reference list. I was furious that my time was wasted referring this paper that the authors didn't take time to proofread. Forget about the rest of the article (which stunk accordingly, btw). That particular instance, though, was something of an anomaly as the chief editor usually screens for these gross problems in the submission. I'm not one to criticize an editor directly, but I think he felt my dissatisfaction with what I sent in as my review.
So there you have it. I personally think PF would be served better by a more vitriolic and battle-scarred diatribes in these threads. In my experience this is how science is done mostly in the refereed journals. In the scholarly conferences though, you don't really see this. You'd think there'd be these bitter debates there where people had "hand-to-hand" access to each other, but it's really the opposite. When people put down there money to fly to a conference, they're more often than not looking at it as a vacation; some opportunity to spend a weekend or a week to be around hundreds of like-minded people which you can't get back home. So these are typically really tame and friendly experiences.
Lastly, I think that if you are a member that has 900 posts or more, you should really be given a little more of a break, a little "senior" status, just my opinion
