The death of this board was when it became a "stand alone" LOTR board.
Backstory: I created a program that tracks the daily activity of various IMDb boards. It tallies post count totals in every 24 hour period, as well posts per every ten minutes (and at what times of day), along with a few proprietary algorithms designed to gather other info. This data can be used to predict many things, including projected film profitability and audience engagement.
I've been trying to market it for use in film promotion and marketing (semi-successfully) - but it also provides a look at message board stagnation trends, like how this board (once a bustling hive of activity like post-Smaug Laketown) has become a ghost town.
My program has been running almost a decade now! I can look at the graphs for this board and see exactly that it began to dissolve once IMDb changed it to one of the 'stand alone' general discussion boards like politics or sports.
Previously (many may not know this), this was the board for Bakshi's animated LOTR, which acted as a central "one stop" forum for all things LOTR once the Jackson films came out.
Boards like FOTR or TTT or ROTK were still extremely popular, but a large part of the discussion stayed on the Bakshi board. The movie boards activity peaked with the release of each film and then subsided per normal trends.
IMDb started deleting "off topic" discussion threads in the Bakshi LOTR forum and as a compromise created the LOTR general board. Almost immediately, the post counts began to trend downward. Within one year the activity here was halved.
At this point in time, I consider this a "dead" board (often a week will go by without activity)
I am simply reporting this for posterity. I blame (mostly) CTS-1 for this issue. As he is a known conservative supporter and against free speech and true love. My theory is that he "made" IMDb create a standalone board using his connections in Holland. He also 'sold it' to his lackeys on the board so they also pushed IMDb for changes.
CTS-1 basically shut this board down in a sociopathic frenzy so he could have more time to talk politics. I miss him, in some ways...he was such a Boromir fanboy.
~Fin~