I don't see a problem there at all. Old hand folks here may simply age-up and out, loosing interest into already perfected survival subject in favor of something else. Or they might have found a more "thrilling" survival forums like AR15.com (I don't, by the way, exactly as other thematic forums are way too hectic and require a lot of attention to filter out noises and trivial discussions). But perhaps, exactly that's why some younger members (who might be coming from those forums) may feel the urge to wake up ETS forum a bit by shaking everybody like in that UK knife thread?

Personally, I'm less frequent here after I have noticed that this forum don't keep or is not able to lookup messages history for more than like 3 years back, or something... That's pretty much what's discouraging me from actively sharing a general knowledge or personal experience here - I know, it will be gone soon... But if you could just add those good old signals to the today's minuscule noises, you are concerned with, - I'm sure you would see the noise/signal ratio near to zero.