If you want a finger to point at why, some (insert curse words here) youtuber advertised this forum as a place for spammers to put links for money.
Not even close, and it has only been an issue for the past year or two; the main cause is most likely a site whose name is defined as "a disagreement between people" (i.e. "discord"), which was founded in early 2015, and guess when activity began to plummet? No idea why everybody thinks that site so is great anyway (a thread about some of its issues, which got a lot of upvotes and comments agreeing with it so I am not alone in disliking it. Even worse, I've even seen people saying to go to it to download some mod, which could have instead been easy to find if it were posted to a public site, like the forums). Pretty much the same thing, and aside from that nobody seems to want to have actual discussions these days (I've literally gone months without a single reply to my own threads, even ones that openly invited replies, and it is just about all I can do to even continue, but there is simply nowhere else).
Regardless, it is crazy how so many people simply disappeared without a trace, without any activity anywhere else (I've searched for many old users); granted, using the same name on multiple sites may not be that common but for a game it is common to use your in-game name (which can also be searched if they list it on their profile).
Another problem is that a lot of new users only post once and never come back, seemingly even to read any replies (your last visit is saved in your profile) - what we really need are more regularly active users. It also doesn't help that the front page news is barely updated anymore and more and more moderators/admins are leaving (I recently found out that one deleted any trace of themselves from the forums, other than quoted replies). The recent disabling of comments on news articles only leads to one inevitable conclusion (that didn't help the forums either, or changing hands multiple times; a lot of people threatened to leave when Twitch bought the forums and you had to make a Twitch account, but since then there are more ways to log in; hate Microsoft? Well, you need it for the actual game so that can't be a problem).
This is a far broader and probably difficult thing to answer than it might seem.
Discord is likely far from the key reason these forums aren't as active. Rather, it's a symptom of a broader cause, but not the cause itself.
Some history rambling for some context:
I was around on the web pretty actively in the 2000s, probably when forums where at their height. That was the age of Windows XP, Myspace, forums, and messenger clients (and maybe the final days of stuff like geocities and "personal websites"). Youtube was still a mere concept, and video streaming for movies and shows was a decade off or more. Anyone else who around on the internet back then will be able to attest that both tech and the web was different. Forums were one of the best ways to centralize back then (and even going back further, they were with "BBS"). "Social media" as we know it today wasn't yet in place. You didn't make Discord servers back then. You went to Invisionfree or phpBB, or maybe later MyBB, or something like that and made your own free forum. Or you searched the web for one on a subject you liked and joined one of those communities (maybe it was art and it had a whole website like in the case of devaiantart, or maybe it was a forum and you joined that). And then you loaded up your messenger client of choice and it ran in your tray/as a sidebar and you chatted with people on your friend list. AOL, Yahoo, or MSN/Windows Messenger. But for centralizing on a larger scale, forums were the big way to go. Like most things, that didn't last forever. I noticed even by the late 2000s or early 2010s (well before this forum or even Minecraft existed), that many forums (some of them large ones, even) were losing their steam, but through the 2010s it really became apparent.
There's a few key things that happened in this time. The web population blew up (no longer was it only well off middle class in first world nations or better that had PCs and internet access, as the barrier of entry became lower), and importantly with that, a shift occurred where the majority of it was trending towards mobile users, not PC users (which similarly had trended away from desktop users and more towards laptop users). Back in the early/mid 2000s, you'd most likely get online at a stationary desktop using dial up, or early cable/DSL if you were lucky. Now a mobile computer and the web was in the palm of your hand with wireless access and could be taken with you with ease. I hope I don't have to explain the obvious here, but the way people compute and use the web differs greatly in those two scenarios.
I cannot overstate that last point; the mobile shift was a major thing that had huge impacts on how the web changed, and how people used it. Now, people would check the web maybe more frequently, but in shorter, less concentrated sessions. Typing up lengthy posts on a forum you needed yet another unique account for wasn't an attractive idea for most of these mobile users (things like "sign in with your Google/Facebook/other account" grew big in this time). Starting to see why Discord rose, even though it's basically just just the chat rooms of old with new features? It works perfect for a large part of the modern web population. It wasn't Discord ITSELF that did anything. It was a larger cause (that cause being the tech/mobile/web shift), and Discord was a symptom OF that larger cause rather.
Forums still have a place, but they're not the big thing they used to be.
Let's keep in mind, Minecraft is also a bit over a decade old (I presume the forums are too), and not all things grow continually. Games that get updated that long, and other "live service" games are still (relatively) new, at least outside the MMO sphere. Another very big game in this space in coincidentally the same time span as Minecraft, League of Legends, closed its old forums, and then it's "new forums" (the boards) as well, many years ago now. It puts into perspective both how "well" these forums have done, but also how much it takes to keep a forum active in the modern web age. It wasn't going to grow forever. In strict terms, something is either growing, or dying. There's these harsh reality things in life called "saturation points" and these forums probably long ago reached theirs. Obviously, Minecraft sales have continued well, but those long ago shifted towards console, mobile, and bedrock versions, not the original Java version. And while this is only speculation, I'd make a wager that the majority of the community these days is more casual and less willing to interact at a high level on a forum in 2023, versus the more "hardcore" or "dedicated" or "PC enthused" or whatever you'd call it community from back then. What spurred the forums back then was the dedicated part of it during its huge blow up phase. That sort of projection was NEVER going to last indefinitely.
It's probably not helping that the old official Mojang and/or Minecraft website used to have a link here (I think?), as did the game client I believe, and that's not the case anymore as far as I'm aware. I've administered a forum that had a link to it from the website main page, and when it lost that, it was rather disastrous for new member growth.
As for why there's a lot of new users registered, but not much activity? Honestly, that part would stump me. I can only speculate, but I have very little in the way of guesses. A lot of the traffic is likely web crawlers (search engine bots), spam bots, or people finding a result through a general web search. I imagine fewer people probably come here from the onset with the intention of looking to engage with a Minecraft community, but rather are looking something up related to Minecraft, and since there's a decade and more of archives to pull from, this place will come up for a lot of them. There's the whole "1%" rule or whatever it's called, where like 99% of your users will be lurkers and 1% will be content creators (it might even be 99% lurk, 1% joins, and 1% of THAT 1% [so .0001% overall] are active content generators, I forget which).
These are just some speculative considerations on my part. I certainly don't know the history of these particular forums too well, but I am more than aware of the changes in the area of tech/devices/web in the last decade or two, and I can tell you it's not even a question that forums as a whole have just been long displaced in the limelight, so it's probably not one major thing this forum did (or didn't do), nor one particular other website or application, that led to it's loss of activity.
People don't understand that for finding resources, discord is not sustainable or persevering over time. It's not an archiver, it's a chat app.
I'm in around 40 servers presently (some of which are moving to quieter and more private OS alternatives), and of those, I'd say 3/4 are game servers which could just have well been on a forum or wiki. It gets annoying to have to be on a place just to download content. Which is often lost, and also that platform increasingly is against my views of how the internet and apps should work.
All of the focus of the commenters to this article are that community is king, and that's really not true for everyone. I don't need to talk to people for every hobby I take up, and even if I do, I will choose when and how, prefer smaller crowds, and want it separate from the content of the actual hobby.
It gets annoying to have to be on a place just to download content. Which is often lost, and also that platform increasingly is against my views of how the internet and apps should work.
I've seen many people saying to go to a Discord just to download a mod, as if that is the only place you can get it (this seems very common on r/GoldenAgeMinecraft, maybe others but I don't frequent them) - mods which are frequently requested, or they ask where they can be found - which would not be such an issue if they were publicly available (well, I've still had people ask me where they can download my own mods but I blame Google for that, it always gives "TheMasterCaver's Mods and Tweaks" as the first result despite that thread being dead for years, it also doesn't help that "TheMasterCaver's World" may be confused with a world/map, as suggested by the "mapping and modding" category, or the various threads for my Survival worlds (somebody suggested that I call it "[The]MasterCaver's World Generation Mod" but that was too long and it is more than just world generation; either way, they can all be found with some searching).
There's also the issue that, as I previously noted with this Reddit thread, there is very little public information/documentation for many mods; not saying that you need a comprehensive Wiki but at least provide more than a few vague sentences, and images of actual content, not just "bases" somebody made (example; another doesn't even have any images, both just mention "performance", "player experience", etc). The layout and formatting options on the forums also make it much easier to give descriptive content (I have no idea what Discord provides but Reddit is very lacking).
And while this is only speculation, I'd make a wager that the majority of the community these days is more casual and less willing to interact at a high level on a forum in 2023, versus the more "hardcore" or "dedicated" or "PC enthused" or whatever you'd call it community from back then. What spurred the forums back then was the dedicated part of it during its huge blow up phase.
Mojang has been marketing Minecraft less and less for "all ages", and more for "kids". So I wouldn't be surprised if that had negative effect on the forum.
Speaking of which, where did Monotony go, and several others who were active end of last year?
That's one thing i don't get - a lot of users just disappear, often after having been pretty active and no indication that they got into trouble (I've gotten warnings but never a ban or posting suspension so you'd have to be pretty bad and/or ignore warnings to get one) or were otherwise about to leave, and most don't even seem to use any other sites (at least with the same username, quite often I have people on Reddit say "hey, I remember you from the forums" and even "I used to talk with you on the forums", but I did not recognize their name or find any references to it on the forums (even if their profile had been deleted, as happened to many users from the EU a few years ago, you can still find quoted replies).
That's one thing i don't get - a lot of users just disappear, often after having been pretty active and no indication that they got into trouble (I've gotten warnings but never a ban or posting suspension so you'd have to be pretty bad and/or ignore warnings to get one) or were otherwise about to leave, and most don't even seem to use any other sites (at least with the same username, quite often I have people on Reddit say "hey, I remember you from the forums" and even "I used to talk with you on the forums", but I did not recognize their name or find any references to it on the forums (even if their profile had been deleted, as happened to many users from the EU a few years ago, you can still find quoted replies).
In less common situations some people no longer post on forums because of ill health or they died, but these would be somewhat less common reasons than somebody who simply no longer has time to be posting on forums because of work. Even during lockdowns because of the pandemic people found ways to avoid catching the virus or passing it onto other's through social distancing and the use of masks, now many have been vaccinated making the coronavirus less of a problem than it once was.
One would think with more people staying at home, more people would find the time to be commenting on forums and social media,
but it doesn't always work like that, as some people are still having to work from home.
That's one thing i don't get - a lot of users just disappear, often after having been pretty active and no indication that they got into trouble (I've gotten warnings but never a ban or posting suspension so you'd have to be pretty bad and/or ignore warnings to get one) or were otherwise about to leave, and most don't even seem to use any other sites (at least with the same username, quite often I have people on Reddit say "hey, I remember you from the forums" and even "I used to talk with you on the forums", but I did not recognize their name or find any references to it on the forums (even if their profile had been deleted, as happened to many users from the EU a few years ago, you can still find quoted replies).
I've gotten suspended for bringing up a nsfw topic here in context of game lore, and for swearing (even though it was undirected, and justified in my eyes).
I find the rules here are enforced haphazardly, especially with necropost scammers.
The people who vanish probably don't care much about their online life or are very busy like Agent said and just delete things willy nilly.
In less common situations some people no longer post on forums because of ill health or they died, but these would be somewhat less common reasons than somebody who simply no longer has time to be posting on forums because of work. Even during lockdowns because of the pandemic people found ways to avoid catching the virus or passing it onto other's through social distancing and the use of masks, now many have been vaccinated making the coronavirus less of a problem than it once was.
One would think with more people staying at home, more people would find the time to be commenting on forums and social media,
but it doesn't always work like that, as some people are still having to work from home.
Pandemic's over, bro, it's 2023. At this point people are back in the workplace, albeit a bit less than 2019.
But I can imagine a lot more people are tired of the internet, or are getting ill more often even now, and just have more going on because they missed out on stuff for 2-3 years.
That's one thing i don't get - a lot of users just disappear, often after having been pretty active and no indication that they got into trouble (I've gotten warnings but never a ban or posting suspension so you'd have to be pretty bad and/or ignore warnings to get one) or were otherwise about to leave, and most don't even seem to use any other sites (at least with the same username, quite often I have people on Reddit say "hey, I remember you from the forums" and even "I used to talk with you on the forums", but I did not recognize their name or find any references to it on the forums (even if their profile had been deleted, as happened to many users from the EU a few years ago, you can still find quoted replies).
To the contrary, I'm not surprised. That's probably more often how it goes? "People move on" basically. People aren't always going to drop notice they are not returning.
Not using the same name everywhere also isn't surprising to me. I don't, either (though getting this particular name isn't often easy, which could be part of it for many people).
Forum is probably just not likeable because of UI. A UI overhaul would make people use it more without changing a whole lot. Maximizing the view of the forum rather than stone texture black bars would look nice, as well as curved buttons and dark mode. See the attached images.
For those that still remain forum style users (those that prefer long slow messages over a fast paced conversation), Reddit has blown up due to its ability to centralize notifications and kinda killed most forums just because everything can be on one platform instead of 8 different websites.
Forum is probably just not likeable because of UI. A UI overhaul would make people use it more without changing a whole lot. Maximizing the view of the forum rather than stone texture black bars would look nice, as well as curved buttons and dark mode. See the attached images.
I like having some negative space. DOOMWORLD.com uses the full-length posts and it looks weirdly crowded despite having little content. And you don't even get more words in for shorter posts since it's only expanding horizontal space.
For those that still remain forum style users (those that prefer long slow messages over a fast paced conversation), Reddit has blown up due to its ability to centralize notifications and kinda killed most forums just because everything can be on one platform instead of 8 different websites.
Reddit is having some changes that are about to cause an exodus from the platform a la tumblr.
The last thread was like 3 weeks ago, and by me
NamePerson was_taken
> Is there a command to find bastions with?
by berukmano 17 hours agoWhat are you talking about?
-
There's a handful of people here who talk everyday without fault, me one of them as of late because I didn't want the place to die completely.
If you want a finger to point at why, some (insert curse words here) youtuber advertised this forum as a place for spammers to put links for money.
Not even close, and it has only been an issue for the past year or two; the main cause is most likely a site whose name is defined as "a disagreement between people" (i.e. "discord"), which was founded in early 2015, and guess when activity began to plummet? No idea why everybody thinks that site so is great anyway (a thread about some of its issues, which got a lot of upvotes and comments agreeing with it so I am not alone in disliking it. Even worse, I've even seen people saying to go to it to download some mod, which could have instead been easy to find if it were posted to a public site, like the forums). Pretty much the same thing, and aside from that nobody seems to want to have actual discussions these days (I've literally gone months without a single reply to my own threads, even ones that openly invited replies, and it is just about all I can do to even continue, but there is simply nowhere else).
Regardless, it is crazy how so many people simply disappeared without a trace, without any activity anywhere else (I've searched for many old users); granted, using the same name on multiple sites may not be that common but for a game it is common to use your in-game name (which can also be searched if they list it on their profile).
Another problem is that a lot of new users only post once and never come back, seemingly even to read any replies (your last visit is saved in your profile) - what we really need are more regularly active users. It also doesn't help that the front page news is barely updated anymore and more and more moderators/admins are leaving (I recently found out that one deleted any trace of themselves from the forums, other than quoted replies). The recent disabling of comments on news articles only leads to one inevitable conclusion (that didn't help the forums either, or changing hands multiple times; a lot of people threatened to leave when Twitch bought the forums and you had to make a Twitch account, but since then there are more ways to log in; hate Microsoft? Well, you need it for the actual game so that can't be a problem).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
This is a far broader and probably difficult thing to answer than it might seem.
Discord is likely far from the key reason these forums aren't as active. Rather, it's a symptom of a broader cause, but not the cause itself.
Some history rambling for some context:
I was around on the web pretty actively in the 2000s, probably when forums where at their height. That was the age of Windows XP, Myspace, forums, and messenger clients (and maybe the final days of stuff like geocities and "personal websites"). Youtube was still a mere concept, and video streaming for movies and shows was a decade off or more. Anyone else who around on the internet back then will be able to attest that both tech and the web was different. Forums were one of the best ways to centralize back then (and even going back further, they were with "BBS"). "Social media" as we know it today wasn't yet in place. You didn't make Discord servers back then. You went to Invisionfree or phpBB, or maybe later MyBB, or something like that and made your own free forum. Or you searched the web for one on a subject you liked and joined one of those communities (maybe it was art and it had a whole website like in the case of devaiantart, or maybe it was a forum and you joined that). And then you loaded up your messenger client of choice and it ran in your tray/as a sidebar and you chatted with people on your friend list. AOL, Yahoo, or MSN/Windows Messenger. But for centralizing on a larger scale, forums were the big way to go. Like most things, that didn't last forever. I noticed even by the late 2000s or early 2010s (well before this forum or even Minecraft existed), that many forums (some of them large ones, even) were losing their steam, but through the 2010s it really became apparent.
There's a few key things that happened in this time. The web population blew up (no longer was it only well off middle class in first world nations or better that had PCs and internet access, as the barrier of entry became lower), and importantly with that, a shift occurred where the majority of it was trending towards mobile users, not PC users (which similarly had trended away from desktop users and more towards laptop users). Back in the early/mid 2000s, you'd most likely get online at a stationary desktop using dial up, or early cable/DSL if you were lucky. Now a mobile computer and the web was in the palm of your hand with wireless access and could be taken with you with ease. I hope I don't have to explain the obvious here, but the way people compute and use the web differs greatly in those two scenarios.
I cannot overstate that last point; the mobile shift was a major thing that had huge impacts on how the web changed, and how people used it. Now, people would check the web maybe more frequently, but in shorter, less concentrated sessions. Typing up lengthy posts on a forum you needed yet another unique account for wasn't an attractive idea for most of these mobile users (things like "sign in with your Google/Facebook/other account" grew big in this time). Starting to see why Discord rose, even though it's basically just just the chat rooms of old with new features? It works perfect for a large part of the modern web population. It wasn't Discord ITSELF that did anything. It was a larger cause (that cause being the tech/mobile/web shift), and Discord was a symptom OF that larger cause rather.
Forums still have a place, but they're not the big thing they used to be.
Let's keep in mind, Minecraft is also a bit over a decade old (I presume the forums are too), and not all things grow continually. Games that get updated that long, and other "live service" games are still (relatively) new, at least outside the MMO sphere. Another very big game in this space in coincidentally the same time span as Minecraft, League of Legends, closed its old forums, and then it's "new forums" (the boards) as well, many years ago now. It puts into perspective both how "well" these forums have done, but also how much it takes to keep a forum active in the modern web age. It wasn't going to grow forever. In strict terms, something is either growing, or dying. There's these harsh reality things in life called "saturation points" and these forums probably long ago reached theirs. Obviously, Minecraft sales have continued well, but those long ago shifted towards console, mobile, and bedrock versions, not the original Java version. And while this is only speculation, I'd make a wager that the majority of the community these days is more casual and less willing to interact at a high level on a forum in 2023, versus the more "hardcore" or "dedicated" or "PC enthused" or whatever you'd call it community from back then. What spurred the forums back then was the dedicated part of it during its huge blow up phase. That sort of projection was NEVER going to last indefinitely.
It's probably not helping that the old official Mojang and/or Minecraft website used to have a link here (I think?), as did the game client I believe, and that's not the case anymore as far as I'm aware. I've administered a forum that had a link to it from the website main page, and when it lost that, it was rather disastrous for new member growth.
As for why there's a lot of new users registered, but not much activity? Honestly, that part would stump me. I can only speculate, but I have very little in the way of guesses. A lot of the traffic is likely web crawlers (search engine bots), spam bots, or people finding a result through a general web search. I imagine fewer people probably come here from the onset with the intention of looking to engage with a Minecraft community, but rather are looking something up related to Minecraft, and since there's a decade and more of archives to pull from, this place will come up for a lot of them. There's the whole "1%" rule or whatever it's called, where like 99% of your users will be lurkers and 1% will be content creators (it might even be 99% lurk, 1% joins, and 1% of THAT 1% [so .0001% overall] are active content generators, I forget which).
These are just some speculative considerations on my part. I certainly don't know the history of these particular forums too well, but I am more than aware of the changes in the area of tech/devices/web in the last decade or two, and I can tell you it's not even a question that forums as a whole have just been long displaced in the limelight, so it's probably not one major thing this forum did (or didn't do), nor one particular other website or application, that led to it's loss of activity.
@TheMasterCaver @Princess_Garnet
Well it's gotten worse, Ian made a thread; 470 New Members In The Last 24 Hours. - Forum Discussion & Info - Forums - Minecraft Forum - Minecraft Forum
At least we have some new active people lately.
Let me add this link and the seethe over it; Please stop making Discord servers for things that shouldn't be Discord servers | PC Gamer
People don't understand that for finding resources, discord is not sustainable or persevering over time. It's not an archiver, it's a chat app.
I'm in around 40 servers presently (some of which are moving to quieter and more private OS alternatives), and of those, I'd say 3/4 are game servers which could just have well been on a forum or wiki. It gets annoying to have to be on a place just to download content. Which is often lost, and also that platform increasingly is against my views of how the internet and apps should work.
All of the focus of the commenters to this article are that community is king, and that's really not true for everyone. I don't need to talk to people for every hobby I take up, and even if I do, I will choose when and how, prefer smaller crowds, and want it separate from the content of the actual hobby.
I've seen many people saying to go to a Discord just to download a mod, as if that is the only place you can get it (this seems very common on r/GoldenAgeMinecraft, maybe others but I don't frequent them) - mods which are frequently requested, or they ask where they can be found - which would not be such an issue if they were publicly available (well, I've still had people ask me where they can download my own mods but I blame Google for that, it always gives "TheMasterCaver's Mods and Tweaks" as the first result despite that thread being dead for years, it also doesn't help that "TheMasterCaver's World" may be confused with a world/map, as suggested by the "mapping and modding" category, or the various threads for my Survival worlds (somebody suggested that I call it "[The]MasterCaver's World Generation Mod" but that was too long and it is more than just world generation; either way, they can all be found with some searching).
There's also the issue that, as I previously noted with this Reddit thread, there is very little public information/documentation for many mods; not saying that you need a comprehensive Wiki but at least provide more than a few vague sentences, and images of actual content, not just "bases" somebody made (example; another doesn't even have any images, both just mention "performance", "player experience", etc). The layout and formatting options on the forums also make it much easier to give descriptive content (I have no idea what Discord provides but Reddit is very lacking).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Mojang has been marketing Minecraft less and less for "all ages", and more for "kids". So I wouldn't be surprised if that had negative effect on the forum.
Speaking of which, where did Monotonality go, and several others who were active end of last year?
That's one thing i don't get - a lot of users just disappear, often after having been pretty active and no indication that they got into trouble (I've gotten warnings but never a ban or posting suspension so you'd have to be pretty bad and/or ignore warnings to get one) or were otherwise about to leave, and most don't even seem to use any other sites (at least with the same username, quite often I have people on Reddit say "hey, I remember you from the forums" and even "I used to talk with you on the forums", but I did not recognize their name or find any references to it on the forums (even if their profile had been deleted, as happened to many users from the EU a few years ago, you can still find quoted replies).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
In less common situations some people no longer post on forums because of ill health or they died, but these would be somewhat less common reasons than somebody who simply no longer has time to be posting on forums because of work. Even during lockdowns because of the pandemic people found ways to avoid catching the virus or passing it onto other's through social distancing and the use of masks, now many have been vaccinated making the coronavirus less of a problem than it once was.
One would think with more people staying at home, more people would find the time to be commenting on forums and social media,
but it doesn't always work like that, as some people are still having to work from home.
I've gotten suspended for bringing up a nsfw topic here in context of game lore, and for swearing (even though it was undirected, and justified in my eyes).
I find the rules here are enforced haphazardly, especially with necropost scammers.
The people who vanish probably don't care much about their online life or are very busy like Agent said and just delete things willy nilly.
Pandemic's over, bro, it's 2023. At this point people are back in the workplace, albeit a bit less than 2019.
But I can imagine a lot more people are tired of the internet, or are getting ill more often even now, and just have more going on because they missed out on stuff for 2-3 years.
Oh, sorry! My fault? Hahaha, oops.
Anyway...
To the contrary, I'm not surprised. That's probably more often how it goes? "People move on" basically. People aren't always going to drop notice they are not returning.
Not using the same name everywhere also isn't surprising to me. I don't, either (though getting this particular name isn't often easy, which could be part of it for many people).
Forum is probably just not likeable because of UI. A UI overhaul would make people use it more without changing a whole lot. Maximizing the view of the forum rather than stone texture black bars would look nice, as well as curved buttons and dark mode. See the attached images.
For those that still remain forum style users (those that prefer long slow messages over a fast paced conversation), Reddit has blown up due to its ability to centralize notifications and kinda killed most forums just because everything can be on one platform instead of 8 different websites.
I like having some negative space. DOOMWORLD.com uses the full-length posts and it looks weirdly crowded despite having little content. And you don't even get more words in for shorter posts since it's only expanding horizontal space.
Reddit is having some changes that are about to cause an exodus from the platform a la tumblr.
Upcoming Reddit changes may end free third-party apps (9to5google.com)