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I'm new at GC but here's my guesses:
1. Fewer people find it in the first place because "Sailor Moon Forum" comes up first on a search engine for people trying to find forums related to Sailor Moon, whereas the name Galaxy Cauldron hails from an object near the very end of the manga that AFAIK does not appear in any other iteration of Sailor Moon so many fans haven't even heard of it (I myself first heard of that when wikiwalking on Wikimoon, and only heard of the forums about a week ago, from people on these forums).
2. GC's entire look and structure, and the nature of it's regulars, all encourage very concentrated, high-focus posts rather than a larger volume of more casual posts as SMF tends to have. Everywhere you look on GC it's like somebody put a ton of effort into trying to make each thing some kind of presentation. So fewer posts but with a ton of thought put into most of them, seems to be more common there.
3. It does sound like some of their people went on trips or things for the holidays so it may be quieter than normal? Plus I think everything is more active in summers due to school semester stuff for those affected by such things. (Also the warm weather makes people more energetic than the cold. That's why Queen Metallia's triumph is inevitable, foolish humans! Mwa ha ha!)
I think you're thinking of this forum's (recently blanked) archive section, not the Galaxy Cauldron Forums?
1. Fewer people find it in the first place because "Sailor Moon Forum" comes up first on a search engine for people trying to find forums related to Sailor Moon, whereas the name Galaxy Cauldron hails from an object near the very end of the manga that AFAIK does not appear in any other iteration of Sailor Moon so many fans haven't even heard of it (I myself first heard of that when wikiwalking on Wikimoon, and only heard of the forums about a week ago, from people on these forums).
2. GC's entire look and structure, and the nature of it's regulars, all encourage very concentrated, high-focus posts rather than a larger volume of more casual posts as SMF tends to have. Everywhere you look on GC it's like somebody put a ton of effort into trying to make each thing some kind of presentation. So fewer posts but with a ton of thought put into most of them, seems to be more common there.
3. It does sound like some of their people went on trips or things for the holidays so it may be quieter than normal? Plus I think everything is more active in summers due to school semester stuff for those affected by such things. (Also the warm weather makes people more energetic than the cold. That's why Queen Metallia's triumph is inevitable, foolish humans! Mwa ha ha!)
Onuzim Ima said:
As far as I know, the Galaxy Cauldron is just some kind of archive or junkheap where SPAM, forbidden topics or long-abandoned discussions etc. "go to die" as the official description already states. 
It's a shame to see they're kind of dead now because they were very active when I first started posting there a few years ago when Crystal was first announced. The people there all seemed very nice though I always felt like their rules for some things like how to change your avatar felt overly complex. I remember getting a warning from a mod because I didn't ask for permission to change my avatar first and I didn't know that rule existed. But even when the forums were still active, it always seemed like the fan theories section was the most active part on the site.
I want to be supportive of fellow communities so rather than talk about another site I want to hijack this discussion a bit and ask the following question just as a conversation starter:
Why do people still use forums these days? Where is the bulk of the fan community?
There was a period where LiveJournal was huge in the community and these days I think a lot of it has moved to Twitter and somewhat Facebook. I am curious why everyone here still prefers forums, and whether you think there has been a steady dwindling of forum activity for the community in general (relative to its heyday in PGSM; forums really took off compared to the original series airing when mailinglists and newsgroups were all the rage) and if so, whether you think that is because more people prefer realtime conversation.
I personally find Twitter to be a bit hard to parse; it tends to be realtime whereas forums give you time to breath and have history to them. Maybe Discord and other services will eventually replace them.
Why do people still use forums these days? Where is the bulk of the fan community?
There was a period where LiveJournal was huge in the community and these days I think a lot of it has moved to Twitter and somewhat Facebook. I am curious why everyone here still prefers forums, and whether you think there has been a steady dwindling of forum activity for the community in general (relative to its heyday in PGSM; forums really took off compared to the original series airing when mailinglists and newsgroups were all the rage) and if so, whether you think that is because more people prefer realtime conversation.
I personally find Twitter to be a bit hard to parse; it tends to be realtime whereas forums give you time to breath and have history to them. Maybe Discord and other services will eventually replace them.
I still use social media heavily but I like forums because there's no character limit, which makes it easier to express your thoughts, and there's an edit button if you need to fix typos. I also think forums are easier to track down topics and find information you're looking for than on social media. Most Sailor Moon Facebook groups seem to be more focused on sharing artwork and memes and talking about merchandise deals rather than talking about the series itself. I just like the more formal atmosphere of the forum setting in general.
I'm semi-new to the Sailor Moon community as I haven't really actively participated in it until the past year or so (and only started investigating it at all in 2011, but that was mostly just via Deviantart).
As such, I'm not sure what the most active Sailor Moon discussion area really is these days! I can't pinpoint it. It could just be very spread out into different channels, due to an overall breakdown in "mainstream" culture going on with the progression of internet technology and people seeking out stuff exactly relevant to their preferences. But I would think there would be enough people who are interested in Sailor Moon in general that their could be a clearer congregating point for the franchise.
One venue that hasn't been mentioned here yet is Tumblr. You can pretty much post text of any length with any (legal) images you want on a Tumblr, and then people may sometimes reply. However, it is far, far more common to get a stream of simple "likes" or subscriptions in response to a tumblr, rather than a back and forth discussion with somebody else on tumblr (and when those do happen they seem to hew towards being one-offs between two people on a really specific subject). Also, a lot of the emphasis of a tumblr winds up being more around pictures, or around a single person showing a thing of interest to others (or putting their own rambling train of thought out there) without it ever really turning into a discussion or a debate.
I have definitely gotten the vibe that internet forums, in general, have decreased in usage. I'm not sure exactly why, but out of all the forum communities I've poked at in the post decade this is the most active, here and now (with the second most active being PureZC, a Zelda fangame forum). So when people talk about this place being 'dead now' I go, huh.
I do think active chat communities gain a bit more popularity as many people like realtime responses. And given how that was going for a few hours the other day with the temporary chat, I think some of SMF's members also have that tendency.
As for myself, I generally prefer forums for organized discussions and a good place to lay out my entire long rambling trains of thought, without it being just me throwing it to the void on a tumblr somewhere and seeing if people hit "like" or whatever. I don't care about likes, I want to see people's thoughts and replies! So I come here to ramble about Sailor Moon, not a tumblr, because I want to discuss with others.
I would also be interested in a chat, but there's this frustrating problem with chat software that people have hewed towards using needlessly resource-intensive software such as Discord, and I use a pretty old computer (it's pushing 10 years on some of it's hardware and it has 2GB of RAM) so I am effectively unable to participate in live discussions in those mediums. Skype has similar problems but not quite as bad so I can use at great difficulty.
As a teenager, my main social venue was to post on a forum and participate in an IRC chatroom attached to said forum. I would use the forum more for long trains of thought, and the IRC more for casual quick discussions with people who were around (or for more in-depth private conversations in real time).
The main thing that keeps me from chatting these days is that I cannot run modern chat software very well, especially not discord. The browser version freezes up so much I can't type or even see anything half the time and my CPU churns at 100% the whole time, Similar problems for the downloaded version. I can't run it on my phone either, I have an old flip phone. I'm extremely poor and my stuff is all old.
If people were still using IRC or other low-resource alternatives, I'd be much more onboard with going to chats for the forums I attend, as was highlighted the other day with the temporary chat SMF had up during the outage. I also think several people were actually more talkative in that format, such as Redblade7 and ChrisSifniotis among others, and it opened up new types of conversations in additions to the ones we have here. I haven't done anything towards setting up a fan chat but I'd be interested in trying one, if we can agree on something that will actually run decently on old hardware like mine (Chatango ran just fine, contrasted with Discord which does not).
I'm also a little old fashioned when it comes to Facebook, I find that service very uncomfortable and awkward to use due to it's nature of automatically spreading personal information and feeling very... extrovert-y, when I am very introvert-y. I call it "The Book of Faces" to make it sound as spooky as it feels to me (an idea I shamelessly stole from my husband who has similar sentiments). As such I haven't looked into any Sailor Moon facebook communities, as Facebook also makes most of it's content unseeable to those who are not registered, which in my mind is another point against it.
I don't find Twitter useful for in-depth conversations, realtime or otherwise, because of it's strict character limit. Every comment has to be short and minimalist. I don't understand it's popularity for anything other than a simple notification system for updates on projects, honestly; it's only useful if you don't have much to say at once.
Basically, I like having a venue where you can post a big long fancy thing and have an organized back and forth discussion, and then I also like having a venue where you can talk in realtime, without either replacing the other. But I don't like talking into a void and seeing how many people hit a like button or whatever. I also like reading what other people have to say, so I'm much more likely to read Tumblrs than to post my own.
As such, I'm not sure what the most active Sailor Moon discussion area really is these days! I can't pinpoint it. It could just be very spread out into different channels, due to an overall breakdown in "mainstream" culture going on with the progression of internet technology and people seeking out stuff exactly relevant to their preferences. But I would think there would be enough people who are interested in Sailor Moon in general that their could be a clearer congregating point for the franchise.
One venue that hasn't been mentioned here yet is Tumblr. You can pretty much post text of any length with any (legal) images you want on a Tumblr, and then people may sometimes reply. However, it is far, far more common to get a stream of simple "likes" or subscriptions in response to a tumblr, rather than a back and forth discussion with somebody else on tumblr (and when those do happen they seem to hew towards being one-offs between two people on a really specific subject). Also, a lot of the emphasis of a tumblr winds up being more around pictures, or around a single person showing a thing of interest to others (or putting their own rambling train of thought out there) without it ever really turning into a discussion or a debate.
I have definitely gotten the vibe that internet forums, in general, have decreased in usage. I'm not sure exactly why, but out of all the forum communities I've poked at in the post decade this is the most active, here and now (with the second most active being PureZC, a Zelda fangame forum). So when people talk about this place being 'dead now' I go, huh.
I do think active chat communities gain a bit more popularity as many people like realtime responses. And given how that was going for a few hours the other day with the temporary chat, I think some of SMF's members also have that tendency.
As for myself, I generally prefer forums for organized discussions and a good place to lay out my entire long rambling trains of thought, without it being just me throwing it to the void on a tumblr somewhere and seeing if people hit "like" or whatever. I don't care about likes, I want to see people's thoughts and replies! So I come here to ramble about Sailor Moon, not a tumblr, because I want to discuss with others.
I would also be interested in a chat, but there's this frustrating problem with chat software that people have hewed towards using needlessly resource-intensive software such as Discord, and I use a pretty old computer (it's pushing 10 years on some of it's hardware and it has 2GB of RAM) so I am effectively unable to participate in live discussions in those mediums. Skype has similar problems but not quite as bad so I can use at great difficulty.
As a teenager, my main social venue was to post on a forum and participate in an IRC chatroom attached to said forum. I would use the forum more for long trains of thought, and the IRC more for casual quick discussions with people who were around (or for more in-depth private conversations in real time).
The main thing that keeps me from chatting these days is that I cannot run modern chat software very well, especially not discord. The browser version freezes up so much I can't type or even see anything half the time and my CPU churns at 100% the whole time, Similar problems for the downloaded version. I can't run it on my phone either, I have an old flip phone. I'm extremely poor and my stuff is all old.
If people were still using IRC or other low-resource alternatives, I'd be much more onboard with going to chats for the forums I attend, as was highlighted the other day with the temporary chat SMF had up during the outage. I also think several people were actually more talkative in that format, such as Redblade7 and ChrisSifniotis among others, and it opened up new types of conversations in additions to the ones we have here. I haven't done anything towards setting up a fan chat but I'd be interested in trying one, if we can agree on something that will actually run decently on old hardware like mine (Chatango ran just fine, contrasted with Discord which does not).
I'm also a little old fashioned when it comes to Facebook, I find that service very uncomfortable and awkward to use due to it's nature of automatically spreading personal information and feeling very... extrovert-y, when I am very introvert-y. I call it "The Book of Faces" to make it sound as spooky as it feels to me (an idea I shamelessly stole from my husband who has similar sentiments). As such I haven't looked into any Sailor Moon facebook communities, as Facebook also makes most of it's content unseeable to those who are not registered, which in my mind is another point against it.
I don't find Twitter useful for in-depth conversations, realtime or otherwise, because of it's strict character limit. Every comment has to be short and minimalist. I don't understand it's popularity for anything other than a simple notification system for updates on projects, honestly; it's only useful if you don't have much to say at once.
Basically, I like having a venue where you can post a big long fancy thing and have an organized back and forth discussion, and then I also like having a venue where you can talk in realtime, without either replacing the other. But I don't like talking into a void and seeing how many people hit a like button or whatever. I also like reading what other people have to say, so I'm much more likely to read Tumblrs than to post my own.
Likes:
redneonglow
I would also say Anime News Network's forums are still pretty active but they get a lot of traffic from their anime news coverage and their forums double as the comments section of their articles. But I usually just browse their forums and don't really post there that much.
Likes:
FloraKiraraHime
Youtube. Go google "sailor tutorial," set the filter to "Upload date" and you'll see a very active community of make up artist. The other community I know of that's slowly increasing in numbers in youtube is the old school fighting gaming community.
There's probably more sub communities out there like artists both amateur and professional.
That's because 5 years ago even the most unpopular topic gets like more than 10 replies. Popular threads would go immediately to Page 3 within 24 hours. If you make a poll that time there will certainly will be more than 30 to 50 members participating. Nowadays a poll gets like 10 or 11 participants.
Forum isn't dead but its just not as lively as it used to be. But when the forum has little to no activity for days it can be worrisome.
Pointless rant.
There's probably more sub communities out there like artists both amateur and professional.
That's because 5 years ago even the most unpopular topic gets like more than 10 replies. Popular threads would go immediately to Page 3 within 24 hours. If you make a poll that time there will certainly will be more than 30 to 50 members participating. Nowadays a poll gets like 10 or 11 participants.
Forum isn't dead but its just not as lively as it used to be. But when the forum has little to no activity for days it can be worrisome.
Pointless rant.
Spoiler: show
Yeah, we chat about this once in a while on GC... Forums just aren't even sought after by new fans - let alone old ones. I was pretty surprised (yet, not lol) coming back on here after you guys rebooted and seeing very social-media-esque "like" buttons on posts. (There's always been up/down voting on posts anyways I think but I digress...) You can spit your two cents into the ether of popular social media much easier than signing up to and spending time on a media-specific forum.
Personally, I missed the little communities that would get organized via LJ so that was how I ended up looking for a forum a few years ago. I think Mitsukara is right that Tumblr comes pretty close to that experience but it's still not the same. I still think forums are the best for finding discussions and building them over time which is really nice. But if I were an *active* fanartist/writer/etc., I would be on Tumblr for sure. I think there's a good group or two I've run into of really supportive people there. But you're right, almost no one's there to talk in-depth. It's mostly light-hearted fun.
I think perhaps what we suffer from most is just that there are so many more options now to engage on. I don't think the number of active fans has really grown enough to compensate for the dispersion that's happened. On the one hand it's nice we can all find our niche I suppose but it does seem rather inefficient haha.
Personally, I missed the little communities that would get organized via LJ so that was how I ended up looking for a forum a few years ago. I think Mitsukara is right that Tumblr comes pretty close to that experience but it's still not the same. I still think forums are the best for finding discussions and building them over time which is really nice. But if I were an *active* fanartist/writer/etc., I would be on Tumblr for sure. I think there's a good group or two I've run into of really supportive people there. But you're right, almost no one's there to talk in-depth. It's mostly light-hearted fun.
I think perhaps what we suffer from most is just that there are so many more options now to engage on. I don't think the number of active fans has really grown enough to compensate for the dispersion that's happened. On the one hand it's nice we can all find our niche I suppose but it does seem rather inefficient haha.
Likes:
Mitsukara
Discord is a really nice in-between solution that isn't a forum but isn't quite social media craziness either. You can get into some pretty good, in-depth conversations with people about topics that aren't just "who's your fav senshi" and the like... Stuff like themes and fairytale references in SuperS, Hotaru's amazing strength of character in S and what her sacrifice meant to each of the others, etc... The best thing is that you can search past conversations really easily which I find always helps to bring things forward that I want to remember or jot down somewhere else (like on the forum to expand the discussion ^^). I've heard Amebo (sp?) is becoming popular and it's similar to Discord but Discord's UI is really nicely streamlined. I think users tend to be a little more tech-savvy as well but that's mostly just a gut feel atm 
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Likes:
Mitsukara and redneonglow
I should also say, as it's been a whole year since my earlier post in this thread: my new computer can handle discord (and I realize most people probably do these days...), so, while I do like continuing to post here (and occasionally at GC), I now also pop in from time to time on GC's discord, as well as a second Sailor Moon discord (though I think GC's is a bit nicer). There might be something to a SMF discord. (I do think SMF has a lot of members who like to write more organized posts though, like MementoNepenthe for example, so hopefully a chat wouldn't supplant the forum too much.) Both mediums definitely have their own strengths.
Likes:
redneonglow
GCF was very mean to me. They have these super strict rules, I tried signing up a few years ago to look for people to help me with the then 10 year old YKYWTMSMW book I was working on updating, and broke 6 rules within 2 weeks (in which I only made 2 or 3 posts). Also, they told me I was not allowed to talk about YKYWTMSMW, because nobody knew what it was.
I don't know how anyone wants to be there it's strict and controlling how can fans of this awesome franchise express ourselves
when everything is or rather feels like a bannable offence you could not pay me to join that place it's like a prison sentence if you ask me I don't like it at all, I'm sure there's nice people there but the rules are too strict for my tastes
I keep up with the community on here on groups on facebook discord where ever
I still use forums cause it's what I'm used to, it's easy to work with no character limits can edit my posts to correct any mistakes
this specific place is sentimental to me because it's the first sailor moon forum I actually joined where as before I was either lurking or was in other anime forums that had a sailor moon thread, I've been here ten years now and I intend to be here as long as this place exists or as long as I have a wifi connection
when everything is or rather feels like a bannable offence you could not pay me to join that place it's like a prison sentence if you ask me I don't like it at all, I'm sure there's nice people there but the rules are too strict for my tastes
I keep up with the community on here on groups on facebook discord where ever
I still use forums cause it's what I'm used to, it's easy to work with no character limits can edit my posts to correct any mistakes
this specific place is sentimental to me because it's the first sailor moon forum I actually joined where as before I was either lurking or was in other anime forums that had a sailor moon thread, I've been here ten years now and I intend to be here as long as this place exists or as long as I have a wifi connection