I'm with you D@A -- and I'm not saying it makes a tremendous difference one way or the other, but the point is that it COULD -- and as an individual fan, whose overall impact in infinitesimally small anyway, we SHOULD always try to make that tiny impact a positive.
Do we believe OM has a smaller online presence than us? Of course not. Yet they've got no legitimate public boards -- and the one they've got is heavily moderated. MSU has 2 with significant traffic that are more lightly moderated. Meanwhile, we know of at least 5 or 6 private Ole Miss sites that outside eyes can't view. What it adds up to is that they(and other fanbases, I'm sure) "bad mouth" the recruits behind what amounts to closed doors -- while we do it out in the open for everyone(including the recruit, his family, and/or his friends) to see -- and there are numerous examples involving this very site that proves "the recruits are looking". Now, what percentage look or actually care? Who knows? And I'd bet that more times than not, they wouldn't admit the truth to any "outsider" if they did.
It just comes back to this for me -- if you have a chance to make an impact no matter how small -- why not try to make it a positive one? It burns me up that people within our fanbase don't exercise good judgement and personal accountability on this. Not DS's fault or anyone else's -- it's a personal accountability thing to me. That said, I wish we could come up with a way to better control the message on our boards...
One thing alot of bigger public sites(like this one) do to handle this is separate recruiting into a different section -- setup threads for each individual recruit -- and have a much heavier moderator presence there with the only rule being "don't badmouth recruits"... and they still struggle with it during meltdown times, but at the end of the day, it's much easier to moderate and control the message that way... Volnation is a good example -- and it's probably a tremendous recruiting tool for them since players can look at threads about them with 10,000 replies, all of which are basically positive...