Alex, I'm not sure you realise what you've done. Many, many people invested many, many hours into the forums which you so casually deleted. Speaking personally, aside from the time I invested in debates etc in CD, I spent countless hours categorising CD threads for the Skeptiko Thread Index.
If you think people are going to just shrug and say, "Fine, let Dear Leader do as he sees fit", you need to do a major rethink. You are disrespecting the forum community in a major way with these autocratic acts - and this on top of the recent debates on moderation where you effectively dismissed the concerns of the community with contempt, handing out peremptory bannings like a tinpot dictator.
If you restore the deleted forums, you might maintain enough goodwill that enough of the community will stick around to keep this place viable. Otherwise, you're going to bleed goodwill until folks decide that Chuck's or somebody else's user-focussed alternative is the ship to jump to.
I mean, this is a joke, for genuine lack of a better way to say it. I cannot believe how utterly unreasonable, irrational, and rash this decision was.
Just... there's so, so much valuable information in those subforums and threads. Like a couple others have said, at least leaving them "locked" but readable would allow people who are at an earlier point in their journey/learning to read in depth and glean some significant information that can influence them. I know I originally only listened to the podcasts, waaaaaaaaay back when they were actually about paranormal phenomena/NDEs/psychical research, etc. (which at this point seems like years ago), but what drew me to the forum was reading not only through the current debates in the CD subforum and Consciousness and Science subforum, but digging back months or years to lengthy and detailed discussions between both proponents and skeptics. Those threads contain just loads of intelligent (and sometimes unintelligent, but nonetheless meaningful) discussions that helped me along in my personal journey.
Now, Alex, it may not be your desire to foster a site where people learning about the paranormal, NDEs, or other like research and phenomena, can go to really learn and see arguments from both sides of the story, but if I were in your shoes, I would have certainly felt accomplished and taken great pride in having created a site such as what Skeptiko has historically been. With this decision, you've pretty much completely destroyed that and all evidence of it ever having existed. You've also completely slapped in the face the members who spent dozens and dozens, likely hundreds, of hours in discussion, researching, reading, and thinking to produce the content that you deleted. Frankly, "slapped in the face" doesn't begin to do it justice. And all this just weeks after people voiced their displeasure over the deletion of a thread that was for the most part, in my opinion, not very valuable and contained immature and reckless back and forth between one of our former members and some of his Twitter battle buddies. Here we are, about 2 weeks later, and two entire subforums are gone, including, as Flowers, Will, and Laird have said, the most valuable subforum to the majority of forum members by far.
maybe I could find a way to turn it on for a day so anyone can grab what they want. I'll look into it.
That you somehow think this would come within millions of light years of rectifying this ridiculous decision makes it all the more pitiful. Nothing short of bringing the threads back in their entirety and locking them so that no one can further post in them (wherein I guarantee you STILL lose a huge chunk of membership) is sufficient. At least in that scenario people can still come learn, read, and research from the past contributions of the members here, skeptics and proponents alike, regardless of how poor Skeptiko becomes in the future. At least then it would still have significant value, though I would bet a fairly inactive forum that is limited to a small group of people.
...but it might be a pain to go back and try to restore
To this, I'm nearly speechless. You have created this issue, and if you care remotely about having forum members to post, or as I said earlier information that is incalculably valuable to the people who read and seriously consider it, it is your job to fix it. Perhaps prior to making this decision you might have considered the ramifications a bit more deeply, including how easy or not it would be to undo the action in the event that you didn't like the result.