> That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from?

There's rarely reasons for that.

Example on MBWorld:

https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/

Example from HWUpgrade (italian hardware forum):

https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13

I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great fit for long running discussions.

They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to consume than email threads.

> it's not suitable for tickets (jira)

You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you would open an issue on GH.

With good organization and barely any moderation you can go far.

I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy, race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board or in a chat". Ever.

Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication channels, plus another two/three different softwares for issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving half a dozen people lol.

Yeah, because 20 years ago we didn't know anything else. I also remember coordinating a guild via a vBulletin, and it was... fine. Would I do that today? Definitely not.