It wasn't all at once. He was fairly active back in '06, even if he wasn't updating fics. He didn't start going dark for long periods of time until around '08 when he started being more selective about registrations. His appearances then became very sporadic at that point and less frequent. The troubles in the forum didn't come until later and I was a barely active member by that point and never had much direct interaction with Hawke so I don't know what was going on then.