As my wonderful DH (MarkRG) stated we were hooked on Disney long before we found these boards.
We usually make our plans well in advance (we have '03 already planned out as well as part of '04).
I will say that these boards have played a part in some of our vacations. We already had our 7 day Western Cruise planned for May '03 when we heard about the DVC member cruise in Feb. I'm not sure if we would have been as excited if we had just gotten the inital e-mail or postcard. We really picked up on the excitement on the boards here and the chance to cruise with so many DIS'ers (and spend 2 days at
Castaway Cay). It took some switching of points and plans but we are going - Yeah!
I think another area this board helped push us along is with the trip we leave on tonight. We were at Boardwalk (our home) in October and had my in-laws with us. I think I let trying to make everyone else happy put a damper on my vacation which put a damper on DH's as well.
About 6 weeks ago he brought up DisCon and wouldn't it be neat if we could find cheap flights and join it. Well I finally found some cheap flights, but it was for after DisCon was over. That didn't stop us, we figured on a quick spur of the moment trip to view the holiday decorations.
We're out of DVC points for the year (and have next years booked with the cruise and a trip to Vero for the in-laws) so we dropped a note to Dreams and Michelle hooked us up with 4 nights at Coronado Springs. Cool - a Disney resort we have never been too.
These boards are great and so are the people on them!