Suggestions

[Petie]

I think there's an immediately apparent and significant difference between the forums being closed and being deleted. With deletion, the entire history is lost, some of which may still be valuable from a research or archival perspective whereas leaving it online but read-only at least prevents that loss so they imply entirely different things unless your only concern is being able to post at which point yet, they're the same. That said, the decision to close was made primarily because almost nobody posts and half of what we do here at this point is just clean up spam bots. A lack of posting isn't going to make a huge difference since activity here has all but ceased.

Is it possible that changes made earlier on could have helped keep the forum alive in the long-term? Absolutely. But I'd argue it's also unlikely. With forums as a whole becoming a thing of the past online and an interest in pixel art waning as well, I can't think of anything that would have kept this place up to its old levels of activity indefinitely. This back and forth between us is the most activity we've seen in a while (exaggerating but probably not far from the truth) and I still prefer this method of communication but the vast majority just don't.

If you have ideas for something that can be done to drive activity back here or some significant reason you can see to keep the forums open even after disconnecting them from the sites, I'm all ears.