I do agree with the Discord thing. I think it does take some activity away. I also agree that we have too many groups.
But I don't see how a forum must reward its users? I think the reward is the actual input - the posts and threads. I don't need the forum to reward me if I have an acitve userbar that I can write with about topics that interests me. That's probably -for me- one thing thats lacking - people with common interests. But that's of course on my site.
I think we need to get the core users of this forum to be very active again and maybe try to get some more users that will actually stay.
Sadly I can't be more active than I currently am, because I live in a squatted forest. We do have internet in 1 treehouse but that one is not in the treehouse town where I live in, so I have to get 10-15 a month for phone internet, which is pretty hard because I can't go to work since I have live in that squat.
For anyone who is interested: Activist, like me, squat and live in the forest so europes biggest energy company - RWE - can't cut down the trees to start digging for coal. From the once 5.500 ha of forest there's only a tenth left. A tenth. Just so they can get their fucking money. Here's the internet site for our squat, in German though: https://hambacherforst.org/