That’s a good insight. For some local communities, even maintaining a beachhead presence in this forum’s forum categories is enough of a challenge. But other local communities live and breathe the forums.
When I look at this table of all-time longest topics, some stretching tens of thousands of posts long, I have to wonder if some local communities have effectively been using the forum as a chat server. No wonder they’d chafe at guardrails like the minimum post length, topic similarity warning, and repeat link warning that only make sense for slow-paced, long-form discussion. If that’s the case, then tweaking the forum to behave like a chat server would be less disruptive to these communities than expecting them to use the forum like a forum. Just a hypothesis.