Hi!
Is there anyone I can connect with who owns/runs this forum? Whether it's a community moderator or manger, etc. I would love to connect as I have a few questions 
Sure, ask away right here.
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Kevin, is it cool if we connect? I'm running another industry forum (for another brand so I'll avoid shameless self promotion) and we also use Discourse. We've used this forum as a benchmark and I would love to chat about how you were able to get it to the point that it's at now - with such a highly engaged community.
There's nothing really to chat about, this forum is run by Inductive Automation for the community of users that uses its product, Ignition.
We've done nothing explicit to grow this community. The forum has existed for 15+ years and the community has grown totally organically. 99% of the users here are also Ignition users. There's a handful of IA employees that volunteer their time and everything else is the community at work.
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It is a great help if the commercial product offered by the host organization is such an outstanding specimen. Whether considering functionality, competitive pricing, documentation, fast bugfix and feature release cycle, or the phenomenal support available, I don't know of anything in the industrial controls world that comes even close. If community engagement in your niche is an issue, look at the product factors first.
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As a user of the forum, I think the state it's currently in says more about Ignition as a product in contrast to other competing software than the forum itself. It's very open, and that usually leads to a lot of small beginners' mistakes and also attracts a lot of users who love to tinker with the product. There are people here that frequent the forum for a decade or more, and even though the forum itself has some good features and is well run, even if it were 10 times worse, I still believe they would frequent here.
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Thank you. That's all super helpful. So essentially time and a good product is on your side.
Anyone know what the early days were like? Was it slow growth? Was the forum always built on Discourse?
No, the early days used an in-house maintained forum package. I don't recall what platform it was, but it had phpBB-ish behaviors. The switch to Discourse was in 2017.
It wasn't in-house, just custom themed phpBB or vbulletin or something.
edit: I think...
edit2: found an old post of mine saying it's phpBB
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Certainly less users, but it always seemed active.
The forum was never the product, and "engagement" or marketing, wasn't something we cared about. We grew up in forums and it's always seemed obvious that we should have one. I joined in 2008 and the forum already existed at that time.
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what is the main point of contact forum ?