I actually spoke to the folks at DiMarzio years ago at NAMM about just giving them the forum. This was around the same time I sold CaparisonForum.com to the new owners of Caparison Guitars. While I didn't get a chance to speak to Larry DiMarzio, I do recall the general consensus was that they wanted to keep this place fully fan driven and not moderated/filtered by the company, allowing us to freely express our opinions on any of their products. If there's a problem with their products or their marketing, you can post about it here and you know your opinions won't be moderated by me or any of the other mods(which I think at the current time of writing may just be me LOL). It might be different now, I haven't asked them about it in a long time.
Activity wise, we're in a rather unique space. While we don't get the same exposure the Duncan forum does, we're doing ok. Our demographic is quite strange as we tend to get more seasoned players than we do brand new guys. I mean it's way more common for me to see posts here by guys asking about wiring questions or pickup recommendations for a guitar that already has aftermarket pickups looking for a different tone over guys asking for pickup recommendations for a completely stock guitar.
What I'd like to know is, what can we do to get this to be a more active forum? I love Dimarzio pickups but yet I find myself on the Duncan forum FAR more often than I'm here. The Duncan forum is very active with lots of various discussions.
I'd love for this place to resemble that forum. What are they doing right and this forum doing wrong?
We need to find a way to liven this place up...
I'd likely be more apt to donate to this forum IF it were a place that I came to regularly. I'm sure others feel the same.
That's a good question that I wish I had an answer for. The weird thing is that since this is an open community, how lively it is is entirely up to you folks who make up the community. Aside from coming back more frequently, sending people here to have their questions answered maybe you folks can write in to DiMarzio and get them to link us again or maybe you can contact their community managers about taking over this place.
Realistically speaking, I don't expect anyone to actually make any donations and I'm ok with that. I keep this place going so I can hang out with a great bunch of people who share the same passion for pickups.