One of the forum admins even set up a discord server for forum members but a few years down the road, there is barely any activity there with just a few members texting once in a while, yet this is a generation where people tend to prefer instant messaging apps
That tells you one of two things about the audience in this forum, and a shoutbox/chatbox/trollbox? I don't think it's necessary, in my opinion.
This automatically shows us that even though the shoutbox is implemented here there would be no need for it or people using it. When you look at the other forum you would see how littered the interface of the forum looks like, and to say the reality here I don't think there is any use for such box to keep displaying at the top of this forum as it makes no sense for any day.