I knew that, silly!

I find Lonely Planet's Thorntree both interesting and almost as fast-moving as Fodors. As others have said, it seems to attract mainly backpackers and budget travellers, but if you're looking for information about a place, rather than hotels, it can be quite informative.

The BBC have recently started up a travel forum
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/h2/h2.cgi?board=holiday
and it's a bit slow at the moment. Plus, because of BBC rules about advertising, you can't post website addresses, so it's hard to give and receive useful advice without resorting to oblique references. But out of some misguided sense of British loyalty, I feel obliged to visit it every few days and hope that it will eventually gain in popularity and relax its rules.

My only other "regular" haunt (apart from newsgroups, as opposed to websites) is a specialist Greek travel board
http://islandwalking.myikonboard.com/
which has recently moved home, so is also fairly new and a bit slow at the moment, but, as my nickname may suggest, I'm a complete addict for anything about travel in Greece.

Well, it's only my opinion. I guess I find that on fodors you get a fast response. On virtualtourist.com people are from all over the world but answers are slow to get.

Trip Advisor (www.tripadvisor.com) is a great site. I use it a lot.

madridman.com for a great discussion board on Madrid and all of Spain.

eurotrip.com for backpacker/hostel/20something travel.

In reference to Slowtrav's post about the charge vs. donation to use the website, it is stated that there is "currently" no difference between those who donate and those who don't. The operative word is "currently." The site will probably develop into one of those where a donation will be necessary to have access to all the different areas. I looked around quite a bit and would not consider donating until many more of the businesses who advertise their services belly up to the bar. The place is one big commercial, regardless of how experienced they all are.

Hi

I've listed a few links here : http://tlp.netfirms.com/frenchforums.htm

They are mainly aimed at travelling and living in France.

Peter
http://tlp.netfirms.com

Hi

I think that Lonely Planet Thorntree is a pretty good forum when it comes to travelling. But these sites also have lots of nice information:

http://www.trekshare.com/
http://www.globosapiens.net/
http://www.igougo.com/

Regards
Gard
Stavanger, Norway
www.gardkarlsen.com

If you want to supplement your travel info with good info on restaurants and food in the places you're traveling to, check out chowhound.com which has an international message board, also egullet and opinionated about.

Can someone verify that Slowtrav (often plugged on this site) is truly independent? I am of the belief that the people who run the site are, in fact, affiliated with vacation rental owners, as they also run commercial websites for them. If so, there is the appearance, at least, of a conflict of interest in a site that is supposed to neutrally review vacation rentals.

SlowTrav is not affiliated with any travel businesses. I am the person who owns and runs SlowTrav (Pauline Kenny). Up until this year, SlowTrav earned no money except from a couple of click thrus (AutoEurope and Amazon) that provided enough income to cover my web hosting costs.

This year I started asking for membership contributions to cover my increasing web hosting costs and software costs.

I also placed "Google Ads" on the site. I feel this is a way of having ads on the site without having to have a "relationship" with the advertiser - to avoid a conflict of interest. Google selects the ads to be displayed solely on the site content.

Because SlowTrav has been taking up more and more of my time (creating new content, organizing the reviews, posting peoples travel notes and trip reports), I am turning the site somewhat more commercial. In addition to the Google Ads, I will be putting up a paid classified ads system next month.

I created SlowTrav in order to learn web design and now I work as a web designer. I have done a few web sites for travel businesses, but not many; two sites for companies that do that mass listing of vacation rentals and one hotel in Italy - that is all.

No one gets preferential treatment in the reviews - all reviews are accepted and published.

The moderators on the message board are not paid. Yes we do have many people in the travel business on the message board, but we do not allow them to push their businesses (other than allowing them to have a signature with a link to their sites).

I am thinking in the future of restricting a few things to paid members - the private topics feature and the email digests. Maybe the new photo album feature (currently we have this on a separate site - www.slowtrips.com ).

The SlowTrav web site and the SlowTalk message board are not for everyone. Fodors has much more information and a bigger and better message board. I am trying to target a small part of the travel world - Slow Travelers, people who stay in vacation rentals while traveling.

It may also depend on how bored you are at work. And it may the only one that has at least one self-described "incarcerated felon" as a regular participant!!!

This forum is by far the best, because of the high number of users and consequent super-fast response to postings. But I've found Rick Steves' "graffiti board" to have lots of useful information. www.ricksteves.com

Fodors has the best forum, only gap is that its not as good for budget travel advice as lonely planet's thorntree.
Average fodorite is older, richer & more scared of being mugged, or worse, not having a washcloth.