Basically, a lot of forum users were on a studio called The Forum Helpers. The studio had been around for a while, but it had some big problems with it that generally drove people away (mainly that there’s no real purpose for it, it’s just kind of a hangout but not even that, and the rules made it super hard to fix that). Most of the “original” users left or stopped using it as much because of that.

In The Guild of Scratch Forumers discord server (which I’m in, it’s kind of for the OG forums people), they convinced the host of the studio (who is also in the server) to delete it for an AFD prank. It’s caused a bunch of chaos in the community, and it’s pretty clear (to me at least) that the forums community is not gonna be able to come back from it