I'll actually be high-key bummed if the forums dies out soon. This place has served me well as a 'known place'. It's like a familiar coffee shop that I can visit whenever I want. Most of my activity here lately is arguing in political threads, but I do enjoy the company of the people here which is why I come back so much.
The forums are also somewhat of an encyclopedia of my ascent through adolescence into early adulthood, and I can go back any time and see where I was intellectually and my interpersonal relationships at the time - or just whatever cool stuff I was interested in back in July 2013. The forums and Blockland have generated some of my most treasured friendships, and I've met people who have helped me to accomplish great things and work through problems outside of my online life.
I can understand where Badspot is coming from - that he gets stuff on disproportionately to the amount of effort and freedom he puts into this community and the game. But I don't think that we're all just awful people. We've definitely had our fair share of starfishs, egotists, and literal psychopaths, but there are also plenty of great people here who aren't necessarily as visible as, say, someone like Iban. I don't think we're any worse than any other community on the internet with a relatively laissez-faire moderation style, but we've got history, traditions, heroes, villains, and all kinds of weird characters. There aren't many other video game forums that can boast the same kind of depth and longevity as ours.
I have great respect for Badspot for making a place that played such a pivotal role in my childhood. I'm not sure what to think now that we've heard the first mention of the forums actually 'ending' sometime in the near future. When it happens eventually I'll still have this innate reflex to go visit the forums, which will take a few months to really go away. I'll probably find other communities to be a part of, but there will still be a big piece missing. Maybe I'll be surprised by how other places don't have the same kind of toxic problems we did. But even at the forums' worst, I'm still glad it was a thing.