Why are there two different Settlers forums?

What's the difference between the two forums -- forum.thesettlersonline.net and forum.thesettlersonline.com? Why are there two different places that BBs can post information?

Also, I see that registration is disabled on forum.thesettlersonline.com. Since that's where the current Crisis Quest thread is posted, one cannot add to that thread without being registered; however, if one is not already registered, then one cannot register.

What am I missing here? Thank you. -EG

Edit: I understand from response on Help tab in-game that there are different forums for different Regions. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me, particularly for Regions that share a common language. Seems rather silly to have to have multiple IDs registered just to access different Forum locations.

There are two forums for English-speaker essentially because there are two separate server groups - one for the United Kingdom and one for North America. While it would be possible for these to be run as a single forum, it would increase the number of different servers from two or three per forum to five, and there may be significant differences between the server groups.

Official information is distributed to all the game forums, in the appropriate language. The primary difference is that these two forum group share a commonly understood language despite being in two different regions. In response to "Why are there two different places that BBs can post information?", Blue Byte posts to all of the forums, over 20 of them currently.