AO "died" when Jupiter pulled the plug on the IRC server. 80% of the posts were made by people that were on IRC. It was also a great place to get a quick answer to just about any question. Yeah, it was a lot of joking around in there, but just about any question could be answered by at least 1 person that was on most of the time. A lot of answers that were posted to the forums were also discussed in IRC before an answer was posted also.

Not enough people actually knew about the unerror IRC server (which is still at irc.unerror.net), or uraloony server (which I think is dead now). So everyone went their own ways. I can't remember the last time I talked to most of the people that were on there, and forums just don't have the "real time" communication that IRC does.