As far as i can tell, this forum has been around since July 2016, when their community guidelines, terms of service and Welcome to the Patreon Community! was posted.
This particular forum type is a little limited. It’s a pre-made deal they’ve used. I can’t remember what it’s called but when it came up here before i took a look through the main site for it and it’s very simple and fairly limited from what i could see. I don’t think there is much that can really be done at the moment to make these forums more functional outside of completely re-doing it or using another service, which would likely loose all our content. It works enough imo.
I have hope that Patreon wants to work towards a better future along side the creators and they’ve already started showing this by keeping more in touch about upcoming features and getting our opinions on it, since that was a big issue here. Forums that were never used for its intended purpose: to communicate and get feedback from the creators. (I admit though, they seem to only have a few sparsely active staffers here and i can’t blame them. Carla and others are doing their best i’m sure and a few staffers have come and gone since i’ve been here as well, so with changing staff it’s never easy to just pick up where someone left off.)
We’ve been giving lots of feedback here and sometimes it’s hard to know if it’s been received by staff. A while ago we’d get little to no interaction but recently Carla has really pumped up her game and is doing an great job of trying to make sure we know someone is paying attention, even if it is just liking posts, though she’s been responding a lot more than before so that’s awesome! I’m really thankful that @carla is on the team here 