Most of the people who liked it from beginning to end just stayed away from message boards.
LOL, what?
Back in the caveman days of Dial-up Internet connections and dumb phones in the 1990s, online prescence was nowhere near what it is today. Even today, it's still only a fraction of the audience who goes on Message Boards and posts about shows.
From Seasons 1 - 4, it was in Syndication. S5 was where SciFi Channel purchased it for Season 5. But, even today, what you see on Message boards, isn't necessarily a good measure of what the General Audience thinks of a show, no matter how much we all like to believe everyone thinks just like us.
Witness
NuBSG, critically acclaimed, fans raved about it on Message boards, but, it didn't have a much bigger audience than
Enterprise. The only thing that kept it going through all 4 Seasons was the Prestige of Critical Acclaim. It certainly wasn't a big money maker, and never would've survived that long without the ciritical praise.
And then of course, there are a great number of shows that looking at Message Boards, you'd think the audience hated them, yet, they do quite well in the ratings, and your average man on the street would speak well of the show.