Ok. Just me then. I never get hardly any useful answers on either forum.

OP, I'm not sure your premise is accurate. I think lot of people click on the "Recent Topics" button, or even "Hottest Topics," rather than going to individual forums. So even though a forum might not get a lot of original posts, I would not assume that you wouldn't get any helpful answers to a question you posted there.

Traffic must have dropped off in the preschool forum because that used to be very busy. Your suggestion would be very confusing for users who wouldn't know when they could crow-post and when they couldn't. If I removed wrongly posted messages outside the period, I would get complaints about messages that were previously posted. It's better for everyone if the correct forums are used.

the preschool and camp boards are so low traffic as to be next to useless. People seem to only go there if they have a question themselves normally. They are barely used. Yet many people must be using camps and preschools that go to the main General Parenting forum. During key periods of the year when people are considering preschool and camp applications (Dec - Feb for preschool; Jan-Mar maybe for camp) it would be super helpful to permit cross posting on the main forum in order to actually have the opportunity to get feedback on programs that must be more heavily used than just the very very small number of folks that frequent the preschool and camp boards regularly.