Recently I've been trying to get more people to engage with me on itch.io, and to my surprise quite a few developers with an account here had never learned of the community forums opening! I'd say the platform itself needs better marketing, in more places, and possibly improved visibility of the social features right within the website. I say this because, for example, few members take advantage of the ability to make public collections, and cross-promotion is an important marketing tool.

Wish I could suggest how to accomplish these goals, but that's why I'm bringing it up. What's your opinion?

I'd definitely like to see more people on the forums. Where are some places you can think of where we can get people to join? One thing I really want to do is get a consistent itch.io newsletter going, and one of the sections could be featured topics on the community.

We-ell... I don't participate in many game development communities. One place where I advertised successfully was on Open Game Art. (It went much better than my similar cross-promotion thread here.) The interactive fiction community might also welcome the opportunity of finding an audience outside the usual crowd. That's another place where I could advertise a little. (Aaron Reed and Andrew Plotkin already have accounts here, but nobody else I know of.) And come to think of it, my game Escape from Cnossus was downloaded a fair number of times despite being made for the ZX Spectrum. Retrogamers are more numerous than they seem, and I happen to have a foot in the door among users of the ZXBasic compiler. Sadly, not so much in the roguelike community, despite having made a bunch of those.

That's about all I can think of on short notice. I'd mention Unity, Twine or Ren'Py, but users of those platforms have already found their way to itch.io in great numbers. And there are many more places I'm simply not familiar with, but I could ask someone, like the Java game developer community. So, hope this helps, and I'll follow up with more information if I get any.

Maybe show some alert at login to developers who's games don't have enabled comments/communities and were added before introductions of those features.