I had an account on the forum; joined when I was fourteen years old. The site was probably passed its prime when I first joined, but there was still old timers with insightful posts and stories. The babblin' thread always had some funny posters and polite guys.
The website's demise was immediate when SBNation bought the rights to the website. They replaced the simplistic layout of the forum with a completely foul and frugal looking forum with many features extracted out of it. Their explanation of social media making the forum redundant was complete utter horse shit, and they were probably aware of it.
With the dropthegloves.com domain timed out, hockeyfights could have replicated their fight card formula. Of course they have not taken any steps towards that, even though there have been many suggestions in reference to it.