Yes the VG forums has been dying a slow death, I personally blame the draconian mods.
I've been here pretty much when the site began, back when the forums where booming but things are not as they were.
Currently Neogaf is the best forum, awesome community, always tons of activity. Large E3 announcements causes the forum to starts giving the 404 error because of the sheer amount of users and I love how the community use that as a gage for how popular something is. People on neogaf can have a bit of a light hearted joke here and there with no threat of being banned. People can even post things that will come across being fanboyish and be fine, but here you will get banned. In fact here you will get banned for posting facts, they'll pick how you worded things to have cause to ban you, especially if its anything negative against Nintendo......stuff like this draconian way of running the threads will and have driven people away.
I'm not advertising Neogaf, but just drawing a comparison as I frequent both. In my opionion VG mods need to look at how Neogaf do their thing and try mimic it a little bit to try get a balace...assuming that the site admins care that is, cause if their main concern is just the numbers and monetizing that, they should just shut down the forms and place themselves as an NPD like company, luckly that's not the case but they just need to amend things.
Change is hard, but change is good, no need to fear it, instead embrace it :)
