I too have lost interest in the game lately. I can't say for sure that the forum is the direct cause of that, but I can tell you that the forum often used to provide me with motivation/inspiration to be more active in the game.
Energy is not the simple zero sum game that egamma keeps relating it back to. Energy in this context isn't a limited commodity, and it can feed on itself to create more. When I used to visit the local boards, I would read about things going on in other places that sounded really great, and I would get other players' perspectives on things that were happening that my characters were involved in. Reading about these things made me want to play the game more, not less, which led to me spending more time on both the forum and the game in a self-reinforcing cycle. Other people's interest in the game made me interested the game.
Again, I will not say definitively that the closure of the local boards is the only factor in why I suddenly find myself logging in, at best, once every couple days (I also have been traveling an absurd amount for work). That said, the correlation is there, and since they've been gone I've simply found that I no longer have as much interest as I did before, so that even when I have abundant free time I just don't bother to log in. Sure, I could make a conscious effort to try to make interesting things happen in the game to renew my own interest, but that involves a significant expenditure of energy. It used to be that the game itself or the forum gave me energy, made me want to play. Now it's the other way around. I have to spend energy to motivate myself to try to make things happen. It's not sustainable for me.
