RodneyVikens Heya Rodney! Thanks for the post 👍️
Good question(s) - the answer is yes GuitarTalk lives! People have migrated to the GuitarTalk Whatsapp and (to a much lesser extent) Discord groups - if you are interested please PM me with your cell number and I'll add you to the Whatsapp group.
The migration to whatsapp and Discord was not planned but it just seems people prefer Whatsapp.
Also, in repsonse to Airborne's comment
That used to be a very good forum and the only fully fledged guitar forum in South Africa till the forum changed management/ownership, it was apparently up till that point largely run by South African guitar legend Alan Ratcliffe and the new main guy completely fked it up. He made totally pointless site wide changes that made the forum difficult to use/navigate and did a few other things that pushed away long time users
There's a more to that story than most know, but it didn't ''change management'. Alan decided to step away from running the forum for a variety of reasons - mainly releated to how the forum was run as a business but also where he felt his time was better utilized.
Norio, the original founder, continued with the forum as a passion project, which incouded an neccesary upgrade and migration to the current forum frontend (the old forum software was no longer supported and very buggy).
But, understandably, without Alan's vast experience and sage advice, most people migrated to other guitar group(s), mainly on facebook.
Personally, I met some great people through the old forum and recall the ""good 'ol days" fondly, despite there being some very strong and opinionated personalities - it is still a virtual place where we can all learn. There's a ton of good information buried in the archives which I've tried to make easier to find :: https://community.guitartalk.co.za/d/25403-buildmodrefurb-threads/6