@wmarshall Yeah, that layout in particular is easy for me to work with. For the sake of the argument, we'll lump PHPbb and its contemporaries together as "traditional forums"

A traditional forum is great for building a community, and in many ways predates how communities organized prior to social media. You can have a forum with dozens of categories and even multiple boards, with potentially hundreds of active members, and very little seems to slip through the cracks. It's easy to return to past conversations and navigate through them.

Things like Discourse, though, are something that feel poorly suited to community organizing. Everything feels crammed together and jammed into a single-page layout. These kinds of forums often feel like a dumping ground for community support tickets when FOSS projects adopt them.