It has been quite awhile since I perused the Tera forums, what happened to the old forums probably from a year+ ago?

These forums are actually no more then a month old. A vote was taken and the people voted for EME getting their new website up, over archiving the old forums. The threads and data from the old archives could come back but I'm not sure.

For the time being, the old forums are just floating in limbo. Right now, EME is working more on fine tuning these forums due to the fact they've just been released within the last week or so, and there are plenty of issues and features to work out still. I'd expect the old ones to possibly be archived, but I don't recall what the community voted when we were asked if we liked that idea or not. There's really no need for them since with the beta tests coming soon, most of the info on those ones are soon to be heavily outdated and obsolete.