Of Diehards and Bogleheads

It's official: The Bogleheads—proud disciples of Vanguard founder and index-fund pioneer Jack Bogle—have cut ties with the Vanguard Diehards message board, which has long been the most active discussion group on Morningstar.

In fact, the Bogleheads have dropped the "Diehards" moniker altogether, reports IndexUniverse. The group's new Web address is www.bogleheads.org. Apparently, the breakup was a long time coming: A group of volunteers originally built the new site to serve as a complement to Morningstar's forum, adding an archiving system and search engine superior to Morningstar's "paltry and glitch-riddled offering," according to this back story. Last year, the group added a new discussion site called the Bogleheads forum. "To make a long story short, the new forum has far surpassed the old one, raising the question of whether Morningstar's name is really much of a draw to indexers anymore," writes Murray Coleman of IndexUniverse.

It sounds like the new Bogleheads forum won't have any trouble drawing traffic: Coleman reported that, in a month-long period in January, the Morningstar forum registered 2,833 posts over 299 conversations, while the new forum logged 19,003 new posts in 1,885 conversations in the same time period (until this week, the sites had been running simultaneously on a split-screen format.)

Concludes Coleman: "The revamped Diehards.org is better organized, easier to navigate and much more intelligently moderated than the older version," he says. "It's becoming a true social networking site."

On the left side of its home page, the Bogleheads forum still links to Morningstar's Diehards message board, which remains active.