What do you think of the new forums?
There are three major improvements from my perspective
These should all combine to make a much more pleasant experience!
Hello,
according to my opinion as user this is step back. I simply dont like ergonomy of this forum, its navigation and its various visual effect are like blending from red after opening topic and progress bars it is quite bothering. Also it wastes screen space a lot, for example suggested topics are just space eater (probably can be turned off) or text fields are too narrow.
I personally prefer PHPBB like (which SMF was). As owner of several forums I perfectly understand your reasons, but I would personally migrate to PHPBB, you can easily set moderation, you can download lots of antispam plugins, etc…and you could keep similar design.
Regarding login using social networks, this is feature is IMHO overestimated, I dont know why would I give these companies (who lives from selling personal data) information where I log in 
On the other side I prefere you focus your precious time on WM, not on forum. I dont like this one, but anybody can learn to live with it. So probably not big issue.
I think the old forum interface just worked better, it might have been a little ugly and old looking, but much simpler and easier to grasp, I especially liked the way it displayed if there were any new unread posts in each section. This new interface uses too many random colors making it loose clarity.
The WM forum did pretty much die some years ago already, but I think it wasn’t the fault of the forum in itself but rather that most people don’t bother keeping up with a forum nowadays.
There was a WM Facebook group some time ago which had a lot of activity but that died down after a while.
I think that if you want more community interaction a Discord server would absolutely be the way to go, a lot of people use it nowadays to keep up with various online communities.
Due to it being a chatting platform the response time for people looking for help on various issues would be very short, and maybe one can also implement a bot which notifies in real time about new posts on the forum so we wouldn’t leave behind those people who wish to keep using the forum.
Although I think Discourse can be fairly intuitive and explorable, when coming from a different (and more traditional or old-school) forum system (like SMF/PHPBB), the learning curve can be higher due to pre-established expectations.
I would recommend all new users skim or read through the Discourse docs. You may find you actually like it after you understand everything it can do:
I would also recommend admins post the docs link as a sticky thread or otherwise link to it. I expected there to be a link in the hamburger or user menu actually, but didn’t see one.
That’s a good idea to post the user guide as a sticky!