For me, GolfClubAtlas jumped the shark because Ran has consistently refused to take a more active hand in moderating the forums. I used to think GCA was the best site about ANYTHING on the web, but that is definitely no longer the case (in my opinion). The best sites, I've since realized, are those where the moderation is borderline fascistic - you misbehave once, you get a warning; you misbehave twice, you get suspended; you misbehave three times, you get banned. Period. It sounds harsh, but it keeps people on-topic, and it keeps them from degenerating into petty personal attacks. I've never met Ran and don't know much about him, so I can't guess as to why he chooses not forcefully moderate this forum - is it because he doesn't have the time/inclination to be a policeman, is it because he has a moral disinclination to censor "free speech" (now there's a phrase which has all the wrong connotations in 21st Century America), or is it for some other reason? Whichever it is, it's the site's loss. The irony is that many lurkers and other intelligent posters would be MORE free to speak their minds, not less, with tighter moderation of the group.
(Two examples of forums that work very well, in my opinion, because of their zero-tolerance approach: Sons of Sam Horn, about the Boston Red Sox; Television Without Pity, about various current television programs. The former is particularly relevant to this discussion, I think, because it manages to attract the sort of "industry participation" which many people wish GCA.com had more of. SOSH counts among its members John Henry, the owner of the Red Sox; Curt Schilling, starting pitcher; Bill Simmons, aka ESPN.com's "Sports Guy"; Art Matone, of the Providence Journal; Bob Lobel, of WBZ television. I don't believe a free, unfettered discussion forum about the Sox would attract those sorts of voices.)
On a more personal note, GCA definitively jumped the shark for me when a thread I started about Civil Behavior turned into a series of personal attacks against me, based on things people know about me from my book. Since then, I've felt an almost complete lack of joy every time I visit this site - I simply am not having fun any more, and as much as I love talking about golf course architecture, this forum causes me more grief than pleasure nowadays. The crowning moment came a couple of weeks ago, when a thread I started out for not-at-all-selfish reasons - suggesting that people linking to lots of large photos in one thread may have trouble reaching people like me with 56K dialup modems - again degenerated into vitriolic personal attacks from the likes of Tuco Ramirez, for reasons I'm completely at a loss to explain. This is my first visit back since then - just to see if I had any personal messages, really, but then I saw this thread and couldn't help myself...
A couple of other semi-random points to make:
--RJ, I completely disagree with your point about off-topic posts sometimes "exposing the soul" of the posters here better than the on-topic posts. That may be the case, but I always believed that this was a site in which to discuss golf course architecture. I made a number of friends here with people who liked talking about golf course architecture - when I met them in person, then (and only then) we talked about other things. When I come (came) here, it is (was) to talk about architecture. Now you have an architecture-themed board about golf and whatever-the-hell-else people want to talk about. If you or anyone else likes it better that way, more power to you. But I don't. (The whole point about sites like this, for me, is that active participation in discussing a shared interest is what draws people together. A watered-down site makes it harder to share that interest; now you might have people coming together because they're at least vaguely interested in architecture AND they discover that they're both fans of the Green Bay Packers. As the group has gotten bigger, being into architecture almost isn't enough.)
--I agree with everyone who has said that there really is only so much to talk about in this field. I personally have gotten to the point where once I've sifted through the off-topic stuff which doesn't interest me and the on-topic stuff which I've seen discussed before (and upon which no new light is being shed), there ain't a whole lot left to attract me.
Anyway, I'm not one to storm off saying tearful goodbyes, only to come back a few days/weeks later (a la Mr. Naccarato).
I'll probably keep lurking and visiting occasionally, and I'll fondly recall the time in my life when this was my favorite website, a place I recommended to everyone I knew who might be vaguely interested in golf course architecture. But life moves on...
Cheers,
Darren