Why does it feel that the forum quality is going down than what it used to have in the past. There can be two reasons; technical and nontechnical.
Technical
As new sites have come into digital world and they are continuously giving updates/updated versions. PDF needs to keep pace with them, and make this site more user friendly. New features like video auto playing and swiftly including files etc. can be added.
Nontechnical
On different sites and comments section people can post anything. They tend to use that 'freedom' on this site as well. PDF has to keep balance between open forum and a discussion board. This balance can be achieved by, i). Better moderation and, ii). Users training.
i. Better moderation: more and active moderators, plus I think we should go for artificial intelligence based moderation. We should do experiments on AI mods.
ii. Users training: new members should be given little briefing about the site and then few steps of training how to use this site and the do's and the dont's.