Does anyone know of other online forums dealing with the recorder? Preferably with a more classical / early music bent.

Simply typing 'recorder forum" into google seems to bring up lots of links. Have you yet gone through those to see if any of them have a strong presence of early music players?

Also, you could try bringing up the topics you have in mind on the forum here, of course! You might be surprised at how many recorder players and players of early music are indeed on this forum. A thread not long ago revealed a very surprising amount of whistlers who also play recorder.

The problem with people who play both whistle and recorder well is that they are a very skewed sample of recorder players in general - just as, I'm sure, they are a skewed sample of whistle players.

And those forums google brings up are all dead It looks like there isn't much hope...

On a related note, can someone knowledgeable describe the decline of early music revival? It is my impression that the interest in early music (including recorders) peaked in the 70s or so, and then virtually disappeared, leaving behind early music societies full of aging musicians, at least here in America. I'm sure it's not quite as simple as that, and the situation is probably different in Europe. Can someone who's been around since those glory days describe what happened?

here's a Google Ngram graph demonstrating the fall from grace...

Early Music is certainly not dead in Europe. Also it's going quite well in Japan, of all places.
I suspect part of what happened is that in the 70es it was a kind of alternative to the folk clubs (as in Bob Dylan folk, not the Macedonian folk). Well, for reasonable Early Music you need more than the mandatory three chords.
Another aspect probably is that Baroque has migrated into mainstream classical, and playing period instruments is now accepted as perfectly normal in classical circles. Unfortunately it also brought the attitude that Baroque music is not for amateurs. (maybe not so unfortunately, come to think of it.) And the earlier music is too alien to too many listeners, so there isn't a huge potential audience out there, so professional players tend to completely dominate the field (which is not a bad thing in itself), but in the process bringing to the music a playing level that is out of reach of most amateurs, so that results in the migration towards the three chords. You can pull birds with three chords, but not so well with a badly executed Van Eyck piece...
(To all lady members who happen to cast eyes on this bit of a rant. No, I'm not sexist. I just speak from personal (long gone) experience in both endeavours.)

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/recorder/ is one I've belonged to for a long time.

Good folks there. Not as lively as C&F but neither is recorder as lively as a whistle or flute IMHO. I play them all.

ecohawk

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"Never get one of those cheap tin whistles. It leads to much harder drugs like pipes and flutes." - anon

Thanks. I have found the Yahoo group and also a Facebook group - Recorder Players n Enthusiasts. The Facebook group seems liveliest of all.