Shutting it down returns zero value to investors. At best, it prevents losses. But it is certainly short sightedness and lack of understanding if fatwallet ROI is best in a shutdown. Certainly there’s value in the name, domain, brand and community members. The latter needs monetization, the formers have immediate value. It still seems strange to me. Perhaps there was some pending litigation or something we’re missing where shutdown was the simplest approach.
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I think it’s more likely that the revenue/margin just wasn’t there. And the value of the assets relative to the rest of their portfolio wasn’t worth spending much money/time on monetizing. But, that’s just my $0.02.
FW began as a user-driven community and ultimately ended up as a bloated, corporate machine. Ebates began the downward trend when it bought FW in 2011 and Rakuten accelerated the downfall in 2014. As soon as FW began posting deals with their own staff, the forums took on a decidedly worse overall feel, and the inclusion of badges and contests and other virtual trinkets invited and encouraged a new wave of users to post junk that further watered down the quality content. And the biased and heavy-handed moderators were particularly bad. I realize the vast majority of users were either new enough or casual enough in their usage of the forum to not really notice or care, but I know there were enough old timers who witnessed all this or were directly affected by it themselves.
FW’s time came. I will miss FW, but the best FW died years ago. I hope that this and the other alternative forums will be able to develop a sense of what the original FW was all about, where users make up the community and the staff and administration remain in the background. So far, so good. 
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Hey NS, haha that was my thread! I didn’t realize you had changed to a new SN. I’m glad it brought you a moment of spooky coincidence joy 
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I was so ticked off with SimplyBestCoupons portal. I had a $5 welcome bonus there and I was aware I can’t cash out until I have at least $25 balance. Even if they gave only 1% CB on VGCs I was buying, I did a click thru just so I could cashout the welcome bonus. I was expecting $30 CB but when saw that only $25 was payable after 90 days and the $5 welcome bonus remained pending, I asked via chat and was told that the GC merchant wasn’t paying the $5 sign up bonus. I said that was not in the terms I signed up for a year ago, I had the impression it was a welcome bonus when they were attracting people to sign up and use their site. Needless to say, I only got $25 and I’ll never use their site again.
I’m just glad to see so many familiar usernames here 
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