Linden Lab has kept the forums from being populated through deliberate obscurity. They stopped promoting them. They stopped participating in them. They stopped moderating them. Yet it was odd that Lexie Linden, over the last month, has kept referring "lengthy" discussions out of the Blogrums to those very Forums that are now being closed.

As to the non-scalability of vBulletin, numerous very smart web people have said this is utter nonsense -- the latest versions of vBulletin are very scalable, extendable and support OpenID.

Personally, I think it's more about "channeling" communications into more tightly controlled boxes. I don't think LL is really interested in free and open discussions. The blogs work well as a one-to-many communication device but they (like any blog) are really poor for ongoing discussions.