Affiliate Program Support Forums - Are They Any Use?

When you sign up for an affiliate program and they have their own webmaster support forum, for example, like what ARS has, do you find that you actually use the programs own support message board or do you still post about affiliate related issues on other industry forums that are not related to the program?

It seems like over the past few years, posting on affiliate program message boards has pretty much died off, the ARS and MaxCash affiliate forums used to be a great wealth of information however, around 2004-ish many of these old skool programs started working on their own non-affiliate specific forums, like the ARS Resources board i used to run for ARS which in turn, i think pretty much took away from the effectiveness of 'affiliate support' boards.

Those of you who were around in the business then, do you still post on affiliate support boards that are self-contained within a program or, like me, do you prefer posting on generic webmaster forums when you cant get help or support via directly contacting the program?

Do you think we will ever see the days where programs like ARS, MaxCash, CE, etc will have busy self-contained support forums again or not?

Regards,

Lee