I feel part of the problem with these forums are the the trolls and infamous posters (the ones who love the negativity they get for their problematic posts) who keep thriving because people feed their threads.

If everyone who disagrees simply stopped posting there, they would die out, but I presume the urge to point out their wrongs is bigger than that. Honestly, that doesn't achieve anything because these posters just feed on any kind of attention, good or bad. Sadly the lack of moderation won't help either.

On a technical aspect, the forums looking like a 2000's relic is enough to keep a lot of actual good threads going on. The most obvious aspect is the lack of a notification function. You need to keep manually visiting the threads you engaged to see if you have responses, that from an usability aspect is a game killer for a discussion forums.