Hi Bougie, yeah, going back to phpBB, I don’t want to malign it either. I can’t say whether there are currently any security problems with phpBB. There are several server OS distributions that still support PHP7 with security patches, as a matter of fact BLF is currently running securely on PHP7 still. But the point is that the constant development churn of PHP always causes massive headaches for web applications that use it if they don’t proactively adapt their code to work with it. I’ve always received the impression that phpBB is usually “a dollar short and day late”. The very latest release of phpBB from November is the first one I can see that claims to have “improved” support for PHP8, but in my experience you either fully support a PHP version or else it doesn’t work, there’s not really a middle ground. And I know from experience here that the additional complication of add-on third-party extensions introduces another nightmare for PHP compatibility— Let’s say that phpBB upgrades its core to fully support PHP8 but we depend on a third-party module that hasn’t been updated for years that was coded for PHP7. It’s really quite a complex patchwork of issues. So if we’re going to go through the massive ordeal of migrating to something different, I would prefer for it to be a complete package that won’t get us into the same quandary that we’re currently in with Drupal 7. And as I mentioned, from a functionality standpoint phpBB simply can’t do what we need it to do either, nor can almost any of the other offerings.
As for Discourse, I agree that out-of-the-box its default configuration isn’t ideal. It should be noted that most implementations of Discourse that you find at other websites are usually just intended to implement a quick forum for an existing website, and as such they usually don’t put much effort into customizing it. But it can be customized, for example I just made a quick change to the CSS of the thread you linked to increase the width of the post content:
Before
After
