The classified ads section of the forums has some activity, and it looks like there's a few people in need of help. If you are a pixel artist, or a decent map maker looking for some project to do, then I urge you to check out the above two posts and potentially inquire for more information.
Also, the Game Development forum also has some new activity. If you are interested in the development of games, including design, then this post might be of interest to you.
As a side note, non-members can now write to the forums.
Just for clarification as to why that was so, back in '07 DarkWizard and his band of merry men were spamming every BYOND guild left and right with the RSC extractor and the like. The forum mods (Audeuro and myself) got pretty sick of constantly deleting these posts so we removed non-members abilities to post. Afterward everything had cooled down, I guess we just forgot to re-enable non-member permissions.
This should be fixed now. Non BYOND and BYOND RPG users should be able to make forum posts to any forum on BYOND RPG.