The hardware changed.
Lots of people got into the new hardware: rebuildables.
There were more people in the new hardware forums than in the E-Liquid boards.
Then even more people posted in the new hardware forum and it became a nightmare.
Lots of people asked for the board to be split, to bring back some order among the chaos.
The RBA forum was split, and order returned. Now people could find the posts about RTAs they wanted to. Etc etc.
And so there was a board for general stuff that had no home, and there were boards for each of the RBA product types that had a big following, and there were boards for the cliques who had specialist pursuits.
So there were boards for the people who are into RDAs, and RTAs, and gennys, and sub-ohming, and cloud chasing, and who wanted to argue about rayon vs Japanese cotton and why their choice is right. And nitrile O-rings are better than silicone.
And that left simple, general stuff or things that as yet don't have a big following that might grow and can then be split off - like RDTAs.
So it all looked pretty well organised, and people could find stuff they were looking for, and everyone was happy.
Everyone except the people who want to see the entire forum as one giant board, or maybe just 5 or 6 max. We'll call them the fundamentalists. Five boards was good enough for them back in 2007, it's good enough for us now.
It's an ongoing battle between the radicals and the fundamentalists, with the result usually somewhere boringly conservative and safe in the middle. But at least it works, for the most part, for the most people.
The hardline fundamentalists want one single world forum for everything everywhere. Miscreants will be executed. The anarchists want a selection of open forums with no topics and no laws.
And every flavour in between that you can think of, and some you can't.
Maybe what we need is a forum for discussing the forum, and for voting on forum matters only, and this will be a democracy, and then it will fall prey to the corruption that infects every political system, and people will be paid in vaping materials to vote for 1 board, or 93 subforums, depending, and then it will all self-destruct in a massive implosion and create an entirely new ecosystem.