Rover, a very valid point indeed. It will be important to create a trail of links all over the place to minimise the risk of people getting left behind.
The messages on this board (and the pages themselves) are stored in a database, and are not persistent on any server. I'd be surprised if anyone searching for 'Man' or 'Manband' would ever find it if they didn't already know it existed.
That's much the same however of the Artist Direct board, it's not a searchable service. You either know about it or you don't.
Judging by the infrequency of early posts on that service, it took a little while before the word spread, and I wasn't the only one who got there late. I became aware of the old iMusic board because Johnners directed me to it, and got actively involved because I was thrilled to discover there were actually other Manfans out there (even if my credentials were robustly queried after I expressed a preference for the Deke-less Manband lineup!). I'd be very interested to hear what other routes people followed.
Michael H has also included the iMusic URL in the useful links section of TWC, so that helped to publicise its existence to anyone who's a TWC subscriber. More recently, those of us that administer the various Man websites have also provided links to the bulletin board. These are perhaps the most likely route that newly online Manfans will follow, as the websites can be found reasonably quickly in the major search engines.
Other than that it's a question of getting out there and spreading the word.
Artist Direct do provide a good portal service for the music community in general. Since they took over iMusic the whole thing has been getting more and more commercialised (this being anaethema to Manfans of course) with ads becoming more and more intrusive, taking up more of the screen, and slowing down page loads to an anacceptable degree. I personally found the relatively recent introduction of pop-ups quite infuriating.
