It has also been a hotbed of infighting and politics over the years.
I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of individuals who have had a large hand in partly trashing several formerly useful aviation forums, through vile postings (personal attacks, threats of violence, etc). And in that I include some non-UK (non obvious to locals here) aviation forums. It doesn't take much to put a lot of people off.
In the days of Usenet, rudeness was common (long before I got onto the internet) but somehow people did not mind. Usenet remained fairly resilient, until it got trashed by massive spam issues. For some reason a lot of people do mind rudeness in web forums.