Most of the communication in the current scene is concentrated in chat groups or channels (Facebook/Discord/IRC). While this certainly has value to connect people the conversation is als very volatile. Quite a few times an interesting topic is touched but disappears in the dark depths of the backlog. With a forum this information becomes searchable and indexable by search engines.
There’s also repeated conversation, when someone new drops in (or returns) we often end up explaining the same things over and over again. In a forum-like environment one could redirect those question to (sticky) posts.
Those chat conversation also tend to generate nice backstories on a certain artist, artwork or pack. All of this historical information is of value and deserves to be preserved. For this reason we have a Backstories category where these items can be posted and discussed. We’ll link them back from the 16c site to make them more accessible.
Last but not least we think a discussion can benefit from a ‘slower conversation’, it should weed out the more ‘offtopic’ chatter 