The reason this site is dying.

[Evil Yoshi Toes]

The forums are definitely dying and honestly there is not much we can do about it. Putting a lot more time into making the forums more lively will just be fighting what the majority of the community wants at this point. Practically all our activity now is on the Discord because that seems to be what people prefer, and we can either fight them to make MFGG what we want it to be until they get upset and leave, or we can listen to them and let MFGG change with the times. I love forums. I grew up using forums, and I like the more structured format which allows for more thought-out posts and generally keeps things on topic. But it would be selfish to try to push people away from Discord onto a platform they don't like as much just because that's how many of the older members prefer it. All the staff already has a limited amount of time to dedicate to MFGG what with our personal lives going on, so dedicating too much time to making the less preferred platform better instead of putting most of the focus on making the Discord as good as it can be would be a waste.

Our Discord is doing well in terms of activity, but the concerns about the community moving away from fangaming are certainly valid concerns. There have been efforts to guide conversations more toward fan gaming and videogames in general on the Discord which have been, in my opinion, somewhat successful, but there's no doubt that the community's general interests now are a little different from what they were in the early 2000s or even in 2013 when I became active on the forums. The people who used to be active members during the MFGG Forums' heyday are no longer teenagers who can come home from school to mess around making forum posts and working on their fangames. I didn't join the forums until 2013 and even I'm about to graduate college, so the people who were around even before then are well into adulthood. MFGG has always relied on nerdy teenagers with time on their hands to dedicate to this fun hobby, and as people grow up and their lives become more and more hectic they move on and new nerdy teenagers come in who grew up in a different setting and have different experiences. That's inevitable.

That said, MFGG's community now is not without its problems. MFGG has become a much friendlier place with a lot less petty drama, but it has also lost a lot of its focus on fangaming. Part of it is, like General said, because of Mario Maker being a more user-friendly way of creating something similar to a fangame and therefore satisfying a lot of people enough. Another part of it is because, like Vinny said, there is a huge anti-fangame wave going on in social media. This is probably what hurts the most. Youtubers and gaming articles are misinforming people by telling them that any and all fan games will likely be taken down, despite our site having existed peacefully for decades. You can try to explain to people that these games are taken down because they are remakes or because they are monetized and that there are thousands of Nintendo fan games that encounter no issues at all, but people don't care. They just want to fuss and if you get in the way of their fussing they get upset and don't listen. It's unfortunate and it has definitely hurt the fan game scene, but it's something we can't battle easily. There have been efforts made to inform people properly, especially by the MFGG Twitter, but that only goes so far and tends to only be spread among people already in the fan game community which doesn't really help us grow.

I'd love to find a solution to this problem. I think we all would. Realistically though I don't think it's something we can just solve. But whatever happens, as long as MFGG is serving as a place for people, even if just a handful, to share their passion for fan games and games in general, it's serving its purpose.