Anyone read the module description over in the project area? Perhaps it's just all of us...

Forum 4.4.3

With the release of version 4.4.3 of the Forum module comes a new era of stability. The module team has spent several months being rewritting the module and then three months testing the module with the help of a beta team. Critical errors exposed previously have been corrected along with emphasis on multi-portal usage to ensure maximum compatibility in all environments.

Also with the release of 4.4.3, email notifications and permissions have been overhauled to offer the dependability necessary for any high volume community. Email notifications can now be sent via a scheduled task which runs as a background process. This enables high volume communities, such as DotNetNuke, to send thousands of emails to users actively subscribed to discussions without slowing down the performance for the end users. The introduction of the permissions grid, which has been applied at the forum level,  which offers administrators the flexibility to set which roles can (or cannot) start new threads, reply to threads, pin threads, lock threads, moderate threads, add attachments, or simply view a forum's content.  

The core forum is the best advertising for AF... but that is neither here nor there now.

Now it is about usability and lasting impressions here, on the mothership.

Terp, you are crackin' me up.

Was that before or after John, Nina, et al, lost their moderator status? Unless they have added some, I suspect the moderation pool has shrunk and the response rates reflect this; Mitchel and Sabastian can only do so much. :)

I still think it's related to the rollout of those 'service packages' and trying to scale back the 'free' help in the forums, but I could be wrong.