Honestly, to summarize the history of the forums:
2014 was the Hype Period
2015-2016 started to die down
2017-2018 was pretty silent
2018-2019 was just Ban Reports and Quinci
2020-2021 is modern forums time
There were a lot of leaving and demotion threads back then in the day.
So basically the end of the Cambrian Explosion but it’s Dark-Gaming forums.
Well it was still kinda active.
2017-2018 is kinda the era of Avery Ban Appeals and Victor Player Reports
When did the forums become modern?
When it became a dark theme Discourse forum.
Exactly.,.
How did that lead to actually ACTIVE members joining?
Better UI probably.
The old forums was kind of old-looking.
That makes sense, in the old forum I didn’t know how to assign a category to my topic
In fact I was about to leave before the upgrade came.
I mean, the old forums was fine for 2014.
However, most of the DG community integrated to Discord.
For 2014.,
Now, it’s so much easier to use the Discourse format.
Kind of hard to imagine that was almost 7 years ago.
Discourse also somehow makes making posts more fun.
I don’t really like how comments are organized in Discourse forums though. 
Also, Discourse is nothing new as well.
What’s the difference
Well, it’s definitely better than the old forums and the TCF, but there are other forum websites that do it much better.
Personally, I’d rather have replies to specific comments all bunched up together like how Reddit or Youtube does it.
Same thing here tho…
There are surprisingly quite a few Discourse communities out there if you try to look for them.
Unlike Fandom Wikis, they are pretty disparate from one another - having little to no association with one another besides the fact they are all Discourse forums.
The popular ones have large-ass threads that are a pain to scroll through. . .
Look at this for an example:
Look at this. . .
1185 replies. . .
Nope 1184.
Cats are majestic creatures indeed
0re0 I bet you will run out of likes
Surprisingly not!
I did tho when I went out of my way to like all the posts you made that I could find…
Wowie… I come back around 10hr later and I see 101 new replies!