Unfortunately a lot of old forums are now dominated by a handful of cantankerous or mentally ill people. After all, one had to be a bit weird to hold on to forums as the rest of the world moved away. Other than them and their antics, the place might otherwise be a ghost town. Forums are also greying out, because younger people tend to be less interested in a site accessed from a web browser (which they might never use) instead of a dedicated app.

I tried to recommit myself to forums around 2020, and already then it was too late to find the healthy community I remembered from the early millennium.

When Reddit started going downhill for some travel-related hobbies I'm part of, the community's solution wasn't to go back to forums, it was to move to invite-only WhatsApp groups. WhatsApp sucks for discussion, but it's more familiar to the world now than a phpBB website.