See many more forum pages displayed at google search results, forums were great in the beginning then slowly lost value but maybe google now sees more value in them..
I havne't noticed this myself but i wouldn't be surprsied. Forums have seemed like a dying breed in recent years, with much of the web space that forums used to occupy being taken up by social media (facebook groups etc.,_). However, i don't think having all that traffic redirected to Facebook serves Google any purpose so ranking real forums higher up again, i can see this as a long term strategy for the search engine.