Here's a question for those who created accounts after WotC closed -- were you aware of other large communities at the time, or was the existence of a place like this a surprise?
I was aware of EN (there were a lot of side-quotes from WotC to EN), but I didn't know how large it really was. I made a break from WotC a short time before 5e launched because from my point of view the "optimizers" who - in my opinion - stemmed from the MMO crowd seemed to be taking over and "hard", "constructed" DPS/R optimization, while being fun in a computer game or on a sketchbook, have little space in my roleplaying games.
What brought me here was my search for an adventure path, because I wanted to warm up my GM skills (haven't had GMed for years back then and my first "campaign" ended quickly) before starting my homebrew campaign. I've stumbled across WotBS and Zeitgeist and, given the positive reviews and the synopsis, decided to give the former a try (we're generally more into "classic" fantasy, so I wanted an easy hook-up). Google-fu about what other GMs did with their groups lead me to a lot of Obsidianportal wikis and also to the EN forums where I was positively surprised that 1) GMs were still playing and discussing the campaign and 2) Ryan was still providing feedback and answering questions (A really BIG "THANK YOU!" [MENTION=63]RangerWickett[/MENTION] ).
From there, I started reading other threads and was positively surprised, again, by the rather civil and mature tone of the forums and decided to stay

(And yes, EN *is* a civil forum. As I'm playing WoW as a second hobby, the big forums for that tend to be toxic mudpiles.)