Th3 Core

Off the top I have to say that the conferences will be a lot less of a draw without WMW for their sounding board.

You think so? I just finished up with Pubcon and so many of the people here either have no clue what WMW is or they remember it from years ago, but haven't posted there in years. It's not like years ago where you put your WMW nick on your name tag and everyone there knew who you were.... for good or ill.

>I just finished up with Pubcon and so many of the people here either have no clue what WMW is or they remember it from years ago, but haven't posted there in years.

I think that is it exactly:  WmW is more of a PITA for Tabke than something that helps the cause.  Now that Pubcon is his breadwinner, he can devote all resources to taking care of that. 

>doesn't the event need a sounding board?

That's my thinking. It certainly did back when.  I'm assuming that BT and Boykin have worked out some sort of cross-promotional deal in advance but even if they have I'm guessing that a lot of the other places that now promote pubcon vegas do so with an eye to the size of the forum membership.  Separating them makes the continuation of that free 3rd-party promotion dicey after a year or two. This year will be fine but it'll eventually dawn on everyone that there was a split.

>mods/pay

That was the original plan, yes.

>write it off as a business expense if the name sounds professional.

This was a problem from the gitgo --one that just got bigger as the event grew. But keep in mind that we were 99.9% independent BH spammers in the early days and didn't need approval by corporate expense managers.  BARconference in Irvine had even more negative impact from the name.

Beachcon - would there be a th3core VIP area?

>Beachcon - would there be a th3core VIP area?

It's ONLY a Core VIP gig. ;-)

>suffering

I know I never see WmW in the serps anymore and I've been doing some deep searching the last few weeks on mobile web design and scripts. 18 months ago and prior on similar searches -particularly for the scripts- WmW would invariably be on the first page somewhere.

That said, I think Boykins is just setting up a network to harvest potential clients and the old forums will still probably do that.

It's probably a good move for the site itself as Brett was never around much the past few years. It'll be interesting to see what direction it goes, as it's not like the members of the past will go flocking back... and the competition from seomoz, and places like stack overflow is pretty fierce.