[Kyng]

Somewhere in-between .

I think there's a 'sweet spot' where a forum is large enough to still have something new and interesting every time I log in, but small enough to still have a tight-knit sense of community.

I agree. 

One thing I've noticed is that it's equally important to maintain that level of activity. Once a registered group of people are active on a forum with a general gauge of a certain activity level, the community either has to grow up from that or it has to maintain. If it falls, it's not a good sign. 

Small forums I've noticed often last a while just because the bar for keeping them alive is pretty low. You could get on and have 3-5 posts a day, but if it's a forum with 5K posts, that's acceptable. And on the same token, if they truly die, again the bar for bringing them back is low. You just gotta get a few people back on and get some level of activity. On the other hand, a forum with hundreds of posts a day would be considered dying if it went down to 50. The bar is much higher.

Yeah, I agree there. A lot of people seem to be good at creating a forum, but bad at maintaining it: it's like they operate entirely on the novelty factor that comes with a brand new community, then they just lose interest as soon as that 'new car smell' wears off  .

There's another thing I should add to my previous post, though. I tend to prefer mid-sized forums, with a balance between "lots of content" and "tight-knit community"... but, when it comes to Discord servers, I definitely prefer smaller ones. I don't do well at all in the fast-paced environment of a large Discord server: if it has more than a few dozen people in it, then I find it hard to keep up.