Time To Get Angry With This Community And Boston Expo 2026

I posted here that we as a community need to wait for 90 days for the management of the Boston show to issued a final report on Boston .Have they said anything yet or do we need to slap someone .

Even if there is a few financial pending matters ,that can be footnoted as such on a report .
I truely believe people here would like a summary of attendance ,sales and final results. Please don't tell me that the dealers did well that means nothing to a dealer like me who at local bourses where the event was dead but leaving the show, telling others things were ok .

Where is the outrage on this board ?

I think each thread regarding the show was either locked or deleted... so I gave up...

"I truely believe people here would like a summary of attendance ,sales and final results. Please don't tell me that the dealers did well that means nothing to a dealer like me who at local bourses where the event was dead but leaving the show, telling others things were ok .

Where is the outrage on this board ?"

You need to get out more often. It has been reported on 2 other boards that the attendance was 20,017 individuals (number of people who registered, not counts of people each time they entered the show). NY2016 was 23,017.

I don't view it as something worth getting outraged about...but I'm just a plain old collector who didn't have the opportunity to attend Boston 2026. Hopefully the show organizers will release the other information you're looking for soon!

And there is the same member involved in every instance (many dozens at the very least) and they remain here.

As they should. Before the show opened it was clearly affected by certain political issues and events, and it was impossible to discuss it without mentioning them. It was not the fault of any posters that some here didn't like being reminded of that. And frankly, it was illogical in many cases to have expected anything different under the circumstances. Now the show is over, and it created its own drama, which is ethical rather than political. Unfortunately there is apparently nothing that can be done about it. So five people got shafted.

I am sure the organizers are not going to try to expound on any negative aspect because the work now begins on the next international (selection, fund raising, planning, etc). Efforts should be on more smaller shows that do not depend on expensive convention centers, etc.

It would be interesting to know how many non-collectors that attended become and continued to be stamp collectors.

Just another nail in the coffin of organized philately. I don't mean stamp collecting, I specifically mean "organized philately".

Could the delay be related to searching for the right colored lipstick?

Watermelon looks great on the right pig.

Porky Pig never wore watermelon lipstick.

Hard to put lipstick on the pig with all that has transpired -- just sayin!

I have followed the whole Boston show debacle, saga, and drama here and on Frajola's message board.

I have been an APS member since 1986 -- and for the past 5 years have provided volunteer plating services for the 1851–1857 3 cent imperforate issue to their expertizing group.

Personally, I am not active in "organized philately" -- and as a "collector" of primarily US classic material, I get nothing out of the APS -- but I have always felt a duty to support the hobby -- and thus have maintained my membership accordingly.

Based on the current state of affairs, I am now seriously considering dropping my membership when it comes up for renewal later this year.

I might be wrong about the exact numbers -- but when I joined the APS in 1986, there were roughly 55,000 members -- and now there are barely 22,000. Very sad really -- and some of it, perhaps even more than some of it, self inflicted (for example -- the "ivory tower" Match Factory saga, the insurance saga, and now the Boston 2026 debacle).

Still, I feel conflicted.

It will be interesting to see how many members drop when this year's renewal cycle takes place.

Any lengthy delay in releasing a final report by any group like this stamp show always suggests they are reluctant to do so. That may or may not be true, and there may be other reasons for the delay, but it always looks that way. The same goes for any possibly controversial government report, corporate report, sports-related reports, or others. Red flags always get raised when this happens. "What are they hiding?" is the usual concern. This is hardly unexpected and can be summarized as "shooting yourself in the foot".

The politics connected to the show, if I recall correctly, centered on Trump's tariffs which looked likely to scare away a lot of international dealers. Although I wouldn't even call this "politics." It was simply wondering if the new policy would harm the show, and that's not "politics." It's just everyday concern about a new reality that looked like it might damage the show. Were there other such issues? Addressing that pre-show concern now would be a good idea. How did the tariff fear pan out in the reality of the show? Were dealers reluctant to come? Did tariffs play any role?

We'd all like reassurance that stamp collecting (and "philately") is doing well, so modest attendance at shows is concerning. But if dealers mostly do well, that's probably more important. A modestly-attended show that generates a lot of sales for dealers may be far better than a more popular show that doesn't. It would be interesting to hear from dealers at this show about this.

The scandal, if that's what it was, over judging exhibits is also still unclear. I know Linn's plans an article about this. It seems unfair to choose to have only one exhibit in the final running before deciding the winner which is obviously going to be that one exhibit! If that's what actually happened. Anyone who participates in such "rigging the election" should certainly be sanctioned and/or criticized so it doesn't happen again. No one accepts election rigging. Final votes should always be among multiple candidates and done as openly as possible -- even among stamp exhibits. We all learned this in elementary school.

Finally (whew!), the decision to shut down a couple threads here has the same effect as shutting down any other discussion. It feeds suspicions about what's really going on. No censorship I've ever seen, no matter how well intended, ever worked for long and always ended up making the censors look conspiratorial and anti-free speech. If this was just shutting down a discordantly nasty thread, that should be explained. Some collectors do have political chips on their shoulders they can't seem to keep our of comments. I've run into this at stamp shows a few times from dealers I did not go back to again. Any absence of an explanation always fuels conspiracy theories. But I may have missed that explanation.

Spending five years helping the experts with plating is very much "organized philately". Expertising is organized philately. It's a job in the hobby, and some get paid to do it and some are volunteers, but it's as much a part of organized philately as APS, or Linn's, or a professional dealer or auction house.