I'm on several UK-based soccer message boards and none of this seems to be required there. The forums are running on Xenforo or PhpBB, self-hosted by the admin. Some of those forums have thousands of user accounts registered.

Is Discord considered to be different as it's a centralized aggregator platform like Reddit, vs a standalone thing like a message board?

I haven't read the article. They aren't coming for Evoweb next are they? The UK is looking screwed man... something bad is cooking there...