(quoted from post at 14:59:54 11/06/23) The forums will be identical (meaning the forum list, users, posts, and threads). The format will be somewhat different, though we will try to make it as similar as possible. We are even taking great efforts to keep the threaded view concept of classic though that concept disappeared completely in the early 2000s. It will have all of the features we currently have, only they will work reliably (which many don't right now). It will also have features people have been asking for for many years, such as Likes, Ignores, personal photo galleries, private messaging and personal profile updates (for example, you can keep your profile information as you want to, showing your tractors and things of interest to you such as your garden, fields, shop etc).
The existing software does not work well. Search does not work. Safemail private contacts works for some and not for others, threads become split and broken, posting with a phone does not correctly translate special characters causing parts of the post to be missing or turn into gibberish. Many features that used to work no longer work in monitoring specific threads. There are others, but I can't think of them at the moment. More importantly, when we upgrade to stay current with security, new things will fail and only a portion will be fixable making it function even worse in the future.
Even what we have not changed over the years slowly degrades because the net and server environment around it changes. You can't leave the same software running for years and have it continue to work. This is identical to having Windows XP on your computer and attempting to keep it secure without changing. It's impossible to secure Windows XP now, meaning you have to change to a newer Windows. When you do, none of the software you use can remain the same as it won't work on the new version of windows you had moved to. It's the nature of the software world.
In the case of our forum software, there is no new version to go to, so we have to change to a modern forum software. Support for our Modern view was dropped in the late 2000s, Support for the classic went away in the late 1990s.
We've worked very hard to keep the old software going. For example, on modern view, I completely replaced all the underlying database code in 2020. It was nothing but a stopgap unfortunately, because of the way computers and networks change, the software running on them has to eventually change.