Suggestions

[Petie]

Do people really think we're closing the forum because we don't want it any more? This isn't about it not being the right software (never mind the fact that moving to Discourse, per your example, would cost a minimum of $100/month which is a senseless expense when we already manage our own servers and can install whatever we want) or Discord being better. It's about the fact that, with very few exceptions, forums are dead. No matter how much we don't want that to be the case, that's just kind of the way things are these days. Counting this post, there have been nine posts today total. Nine. This was once a thriving community and plenty of us will miss that but nothing over the years has managed to bring it back so it's time to move on.

With the new site, we don't want to have to worry about multiple user systems and make most people register for multiple accounts so we're choosing to do away with the forum. Even that isn't a perfect solution as, unless we can figure out some way to reliably tie MediaWiki to our custom user system, multiple accounts will still be required but far less people are likely to want to do anything but browse the wiki so registration isn't nearly as important as it would be on a forum.

To sum it up: Forums died a long time ago and nothing we've done has managed to bring ours back. We're choosing to discontinue our forum in favor of a more streamlined and manageable network of sites providing the content that the vast majority of our visitors actually come here for. It sucks, we agree, but it is what it is and continuing to devote development resources to maintaining a forum getting no more than a dozen posts in a given day just isn't worth it.