[ksec]

This.

It was "the" reason behind 99% of forums shutting down or moving away to Discord. You have to upgrade it from time to time and upgrading is a non-trivial task. Which is why so many forums are stuck in version that is at least 10 years ago before they figure out it can't be upgraded easily.

It was also expensive to run and doesn't really scale. The moment you grew beyond certain users, simply serving the site becomes expensive. And that is ignoring expensive functions like searching. Some site decided to outsource the search to Google.

In the end forums died, free and better solution took over. And it is a sad. All the information in CGtalk would have worth a lot of money now had it been sold as data to AI companies. Now it is gone.