I’m confused… this forum is about 60 million times more active than the old one (and takes so much more of my time…ahem…). Of course there are people who don’t use forums, they might have no time or interest. If there is a language barrier, that doesn’t change with the forum platform (unless automatic translation is easier in some rather than others, I don’t know).
I just assumed that this forum is so much more active because it is, in my opinion, a lot easier to use, and it doesn’t require a different registration as the one to the main site is sufficient. There are so many newbies!
Mind you, I am not so bad with technology, I just felt the old one was so outdated, I said it many times, I was on forums like that in the early 2000s, 20 years ago! People who use social media a lot should find this easier…
I don’t do a lot of swaps so to me the old U2U system was one of the most baffling, cumbersome, old-fashioned nonsense you could think of. It took me ages to figure out how to reply to a message, it was so counterintuitive. I hated that it opened in another window, and the typing window was tiny and it took me ages to find out it could be enlarged (probably due to the fact that I didn’t use it very often). In the new messaging system, it is a bit annoying that the message window is so similar to the main forum, but other than that, in my opinion it is an improvement of enormous proportions.