Some very good points presented throughout this thread.
A comment on "modern websites", though.
Some of these sites have turned into more social networking sites - and lets face it - that is the venue for the future. However, none have found the perfect balance between ease of use, great content and being able to meet the needs of "everybody". We used to scour just the forums, looking through what sequences of posts that users made - or topic threads in forums. Now we're also interested in seeing more about the personal profile of other users - we share more information because we can show pictures, videos and more without great effort.
All of this is not effortless to make happen though. There are new techniques to rate users, score content and link everything together - even XTM topic maps to stitch together "knowledge" from fragments.
It is a huge investment to keep up with these new times, but just like the railroads meant the death of the canals for commercial transportation - there are paradigm shifts in online communities happening too. The value is a lot in the content that has already been produced, and even though I have been away from quite some time - I still come back here to see how things are.
Elitetrader.com has a very low (online) technical entrylevel, and that means friendly for many of the "oldtimers". The content can be reused for new formats, but that is also pretty labour-intensive. However, coupled with some techniques it could be possible to leverage the value in the sometimes great wisdom presented in Elitetrader.com topics. Adding e.g wiki-functionality or blogs could be some valuable additions like pointed out by others here.
I seem to remember a FX trading magazine e.g showing the Chinook EURUSD mumblings thread as one of the reasons for traders to go online. That is really great publicity for Elitetrader.com . I create various types of portals nowadays for clients, and it's neither cheap nor easy to get a really professional result.
With some rather easy extensions, Elitetrader.com can take a step into the newer areas of functionality - because newer generations of users demand it, are used to it and will continue to use it. When we take our time to dish out explanations to newcomers or peers it is exactly because of the influx of newcomers that we see spurring interest, harsh words of wisdom, long-drawn questioning of old ways versus new etc.
Without new and younger users embracing the concept, it slowly dries up. In Internet terms that does not take a whole man generation before it happens.
Online advertising is now worth more than newspaper ads and more, so the potential is there.
;-)