At present, the Announcement Forum is where interesting fun activities go to die/be ignored/become irrelevant. It's a stagnant pond, for the most part.
One thing that would help would be if it were the place where Staff announcements were placed. Then people would actually check it from time to time. Or, of course, it could just be merged back in with General.
I keep anticipating a revamp of the overall Forum structure, which will allow people to, say, subscribe to topics, tag them, up/down vote them and so on. I imagine a Forum portal which highlights the 10 most recently commented-on threads, etc. etc. Is there anything to look forward to along those lines?
In the meantime, I'm watching the wonderful "Where's Bruce?" series die on the vine in the ghetto of the Announcements forum.