Oh no... This was all my fault. Oof. I will try to clear things up here.

1. We did NOT deliberately reinstate a rule placing limits on number of forum groups. This was an unintended side effect of a fix I did, that I didn't foresee, and I sincerely apologize for the confusion and panic caused by this whole situation.

In a nutshell: The forum groups limit of 5 was actually never officially removed, but the code that checked for it appears to have been broken for a very long time. When I fixed an error that was preventing people from creating new forum groups at all, I inadvertantly fixed this code too. I didn't even realize what had happened until brought it to my attention yesterday.

2. No forum groups were automatically deleted or deleted by staff over this. I think what happened with group deletions was that some forum group owners deleted their own groups out of anxiety or to make it possible for them to create new groups. I totally understand that and I'm very sorry this happened.

3. After Avel had pinged me and we talked about it, I've now increased the limit to 20 forum groups per person instead of 5. In general it is not a good idea to simply not have a limit at all, so I hope this is a reasonable limit for everyone that will not cause inconvenience. Totally open to discussing a further increase to this if there is a need for it. :)

I hope this clears things up, and sorry again about all of this. <3