BioWare decided to close its official forum (July 2016)

I think it's a good article that brings up many good points. I'd also like to point out that Chris Priestly mentioned "big-shots" wanting to close down the forums as the flood of ME3 ending complaints piled in. This is just the final impact of that action.

BioWare will not learn from their mistakes by hiding their head in the sand. Customer feedback is important to any company. By ignoring feedback / criticism they "feel better" about their work, but will continue making questionable decisions.

Frankly, after BioWare's behaviour towards fans with the "It's to deep for you to understand" or calling fans "Entitled whiners", they have shown their true colors. BioWare lost the spark, the magic - or whatever it's called. Instead of working to get it back they call the fans names and then finally ignore them. How very much like a socially unadjusted child they appear to me.

I stopped being a fan after ME3. After meeting an all new antagonist and choosing the color of lazer beam to die in, I sat there wondering why they chose this route to end such a (up 'till then) fantastic journey. Whether pressed for time or simply lacking talent; it makes no nevermind. I thought the game sucked, and I was pretty loud about it. If I happen to be in the minority of opinion, they won't miss me - and I surely won't miss them.

I just read that.

It has links to an unofficial bioware forum, but it isn't this one.
Its that one.
And a few people appear to be following the link and joining it.

Ian Miles Cheong is a silly man with an anti-"SJW"/Bioware agenda.

SJWs have an anti-everything agenda, so it's pretty hard to avoid making them mad.

Seems to me the people who are in a constant state of being offended are the ones who see "SJWs" everywhere. 

Ian is looking for trouble...he always is because he thinks hes being righteous.

It's the same socio-political problem of the far left and right on cable stations like MSNBC and Fox, both sides are catering to a demographic and both sides live in a bubble.

That divisiveness is not good for anyone. 

Well to be fair Facebook, twitter, reddit, youtube, and other social media is where the vast people are at. And say what you will at least BioWare was kind enough to give us a warning about shutting down BSN, comic book publisher IDW (which is considered one of the top 5 publishers along with Marvel, DC, Image, and Dark Horse) didn't even bother telling anybody about when they closed their message boards. Which had plenty of fan art, fan fiction, and I had several friends there that I've lost contact with.

There was nothing intrinsically wrong with Cassandra's forum, it just didn't capture the support of the community.
For the first couple of days following the BSN closure announcement it looked quite promising, but by the end of that first week, it was clear it wasn't the one.

The Gamerant article cites that forum as it was the first up and running (the article is just over a month old).

Cassandra and I last PM'd about her site over the weekend, and whilst I think we have reached a civil understanding, we disagree about the viability of her forum. Fair enough, she's entitled to do what she wants. 

My personal preference (not speaking as a moderator) is that we don't rake over what happened here and on that group, simply because Cassandra is in no position to defend herself and I'm not convinced it's a helpful debate.

BioWare killed their forum years ago. It happened when the devs labeled all of it toxic in the aftermath of the ME3 ending and then stopped interacting with people. If they had had a competent community manager at the time, none of that would have happened. Someone like that could have softened the blows, could have mediated between fans and BioWare.
I've said it countless times but it has always been up to BioWare to improve things, to cultivate their fan base... and it wouldn't have taken much to get things back on track.
There never was a reason why the devs needed to interact with fans directly, they could have gone through a community manager. The CM reads the requests of the fans, picks the best ones and gets answers from the devs, then posts those. Fans gets what they want and the fragile devs don't need to weather the ire of the loud minority.
I could write a lot more about this topic but what's the point?

I often said that the BioWare forums aren't toxic, at least not in comparison with similiar forums. Yes, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes people were upset and went too far. But it wasn't that bad or happened that often that you could label the entire forum toxic. The forums had more than half a million members, let's say 50% of them were active. That's 250k people, of which maybe 25 actually attacked the devs verbally. That's a stastically irrelevant percentage and that doesn't change even if we change that number up to 250.

No, BioWare gave up because they couldn't adapt. They brought in third party mods who didn't interact with people, which was yet another nail in the coffin. Then they added more rules that prevented people from questioning what was happening and removed the Offtopic subforum. The forum stopped being fun then, because the mods were completely inconsistent with the rules and people quickly found loopholes anyway. Even long before that they removed functionality from the forum, they killed the BSN.
Pulling the plug now didn't come as a huge surprise and this time they gave us at least a month to organize a replacement instead of only 12 minutes for the Offtopic subforum.

The tragedy here is that it would have been so easy for them to change course. It really wouldn't have taken much. But I guess there was no immediate profit to be had from cultivating your fan base...

While I almost agree with the article I think that it misses a point. If talking to the fans and listening to their feedback was the sole purpose of the forum I think they could have closed it many years ago. In these latest years I never went to the BSN hoping for some dev who would talk to us. I don't know if and when it happened for you, but in my case I totally stop caring about them around the launch of ME3 when they refused to acknoweledge in any way the problem of the War Assets in SP, which were not enough to get the "best" ending. That was perhaps the very first big lie they told to us and the way they managed the issue was even worse, with a single generic answer ("It's possible. Deal with it.") which was immediately contested by hundred of players who posted screenshots, tables, schemes that clearly stated that 5000 EMS in SP were just impossible to get. Well, which was they reaction? Nothing, nobody just answered anymore. From that moment I couldn't care less about them anymore.

Anyway, an official gaming forum is not just for feedback or criticism. That's just one of its main features. What about the walktroughs, the build guides, the discussions about the lore, the modding community, and so on? Even without the presence of any BW devs I've always learned so much about their games, their stories and their characters in that place. There were just so many things that I would have never found on my own and I can't even say how many times the forum was of help to me. By shutting down that place they just deprived their players of something way bigger than a simple place for criticsm. Even without their presence the BSN was an universal resource of experience and knowledge about every single aspect of their games, and it was just something that was built by us, the players, over decades of playing and sharing our experiences. And imho this is the real thing which will be very difficult to replace.

Cite for me an unbiased news source.