Hey there,
I hope you weren't shocked by the new look of the Starling Forum! We've all been seeing that same old layout for years, it was high time for a change, right? 😉
First things first: I had to reset all your passwords. They were (as one should hope!) never stored in plain text, so I couldn't migrate them to the new forum engine. Of course, that's easily fixed: just click on the "Lost Password?" link that appears when trying to log in, and you'll be sent a reset link.
(Beware: if your username contained spaces, they have been replaced by underscores.)
Actually, I've long since been thinking about switching the forum engine. However, I never found a forum engine that I thought would be a good successor to the good, old 'bbPress'. Either I didn't like its style (layout / the way you interact with it or how it allows browsing through the posts), or it was a resource hog (Discourse), or it was just very difficult to migrate all the data over.
However, the need to switch became more urgent now that PHP 5.6 (which the old forum was still running on) is no longer supported with security updates. Fixing bbPress 1.x so that it works with PHP 7 was just out of the question. It was time to pick a new engine and migrate!
The forum I decided on is called Flarum. It's a beautiful, fast and elegant piece of PHP software; I instantly fell in love with it. In fact, I've known it for a while, but I thought it wouldn't be wise to switch to a forum with the version "0.1". 🙃
However, it turns out that the guys who are developing the software are just very very reluctant to raise the version numbers, IMHO. The current version, "0.1 beta 8" could easily be called "1.0", in my opinion. So I decided to give it a try!
One thing got lost in the migration, though: the private messages. Maybe I'll add a PM plugin to the new forum in the future; but I will definitely not move the old data over. (It took enough time to write a migrator for the standard forum data.)
[Edit March 25th: you can now send PMs again.]
However, fear not: if you've got some old data in the private messages, you can still access the old forum here:
https://old-forum.starling-framework.org
Beware, though: this will only stay online for a few more weeks! So please don't wait too long if you've got some important data to fetch.
Now, please give the new forum a chance! And definitely let me know what you think about it, or if you run into any troubles.
Cheers,
Daniel