The Vanguard Diehards is one of the many discussion forums found on the Morningstar website. Although it was created to give a small, albeit vocal, group of fans of the The Vanguard Group a place to discuss their favorite mutual funds, the forum quickly became by far the most popular on Morningstar. The forum is characterized by its contributors' commitment to low cost - primarily index - mutual fund investing, its unusually civil tone, and the thoughtful replies to almost all who post a question, no matter what their level of investing knowledge.
As to Morningstar, we'll let them provide their own, quite accurate, description: "Chicago-based Morningstar is the leading provider of mutual fund, stock, and variable-annuity investment information. An independent company, Morningstar does not own, operate, or hold any interest in mutual funds, stocks, or insurance products. You can count on Morningstar for unbiased data, research, analysis, and candid editorial commentary."
The term may refer to all of those who participate in the forum. Or perhaps it refers to those of us who are strongly influenced by the investment philosophy of Vanguard founder John C. Bogle. This philosophy is fully elucidated in Mr. Bogle's speeches and books and the fiscal principles adhered to by the company he founded, but can be summed up quite easily:
While contributors to the forum greatly appreciate Morningstar for making the forum available, many expressed their desire for more flexible indexing and search capabilities than the forum provides. As the forum has gained popularity the need for these enhancements became ever more apparent. In June, 2001, a collaboration began between two of the forum participants who wished to provide them. This site is the result of that collaboration. Their efforts were, and are, in no way sponsored by, sanctioned by, or affiliated with, Morningstar.
As conversations proceed on the Morningstar forum, programs on the diehards.org server periodically retrieve and parse these new posts. Some of the information from each post is placed into an SQL database, called MySQL, to enable extensive conversation presentation and tracking features.
The site resides on a host located in a Madison Avenue high rise between Grand Central Station and Rockefeller Center in mid-town Manhattan (nice digs!). The host runs GNU/Linux, the free operating system that is fast becoming the de facto standard operating system of the Internet. The operating system distribution was put together by the wonderful folks at the Fedora Project. The Apache web server carries the web traffic with the help of PHP for creation of dynamic pages, such as those which perform database lookups. All of the software used by this web site is either Free Software or Open Source software.
Just as the thousands of programmers worldwide donated their time and effort to produce the fine software products on which this site rests, this site's authors have likewise donated their programming services, server space and use of the registered name diehards.org so that this service can provide free service to the Vanguard Diehards community. Freely you have received. Freely give.
We decided to gather updates to our indicies only every few minutes to avoid becoming a nuisance to Morningstar or their servers. Currently, we're checking with them every five minutes. This should represent an insignificant incremental load on their systems. We don't want to take advantage of their generosity.
You can modify the number of days worth of results that are displayed by clicking one of the choices at the bottom of the list. Also, all of the choices can be bookmarked. If you don't like the standard display (the "Home" view with a single day's results), you can set it up as you like it and then bookmark that page.
The standard search is set up so that every word (term) that you type in the search box must appear somewhere in the conversation. Search results are displayed in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest). Other options are available on the search results page.
A few notes (we'll flesh this section out eventually)... Each search terms can appear anywhere in the conversation, including the original post and all replies. Author names are part of the conversations, so you can search by author just by including his or her name. Punctuation and capitalization are ignored (e.g. "I-Bonds" returns the same results as "ibonds"). The search engine also automatically searches alternative word endings.
The Go button will take you directly to the conversation number on the Morningstar Vanguard Diehards forum you have entered in the adjacent text box. If you have entered an invalid number or left the box blank, it will take you to the latest conversation.
The OPT button is like to Go button except that the conversation # is cross referenced to the Original Posting Thread before redirection. The term Original Posting Thread refers to posting numbers as they were prior to the resequencing that took place in mid-September of 2007.
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