The BoardSort YT video on backplane boards makes no mention of gold fingers being required. (In fact one of the examples they show clearly has part of the board cut off which, I assume, were gold fingers?) Can I safely remove any gold fingers on backplane boards that otherwise meet the criteria for a backplane board w/o affecting the quality/type of the board?

Short answer, yes. Long answer, make sure they are backplane boards. Sometimes backplane with gold fingers have been upgraded to gold finger boards. More info below for reference.

Gold Finger Card Clean NO Fan NO Sink NO Bracket
Typically video, network, or modem gold finger cards with heatsinks and brackets removed.
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=21752&p=43804&hilit=clean+gold+fingers#p43804

In this case board #2 was upgraded for having a high population of ICs
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=21700&p=43653&hilit=clean+gold+fingers#p43653

Just because it has gold fingers doesn't always mean it's a gold finger card.
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=21656&p=43483&hilit=Clean+gold+fingers#p43483

Backplane board with gold fingers graded as Gold Finger Board.
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=22786

This is an excellent bit of information you've shared!



I dropped off a bunch of stuff at Boardsort yesterday that included quite a few of the cards in the first two photos in the link above and they went in as clean gold finger boards.

The boards I'm planning to remove gold fingers from are definitely simple backplane type cards such as these:

If you haven't noticed already, that bit of information came from the third post in this thread. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=21765

I have tried to add more links over the years when time permits.