what about old forum? besides it looks ugly for non-logged in users it is now also ugly almost useless readonly archive.. you did not had a backup of database? what a beginners!...
jow went about it in a smart way. Outside requests to PunBB-specific URIs (e.g. "vieforum.php", "viewtopic.php" etc.) get forwarded to the archive where we are trying to interpret them as the old forum software would. This works for forum and thread display, search and URIs related to users or user management are gone and result in an apologetic message.
Try it for yourself: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewforum.php (needs copy&paste into your address bar, clicking it will not work because Discourse tries and fails to get the content through XHR)
There are no "logged in users" for the archive anymore. Even though it superficially resembles a forum software, it is not. It is merely a means to display all the forum content we could gather in a somewhat organized way.
The motivation was that some content was ever only available on the old forum. We were able to collect about 50% of its original content from public archives and caches. I am sorry you find this "almost useless."
Any constructive criticism as to how to remedy the "ugliness" is, of course, welcome.
what about old forum? besides it looks ugly for non-logged in users it is now also ugly almost useless readonly archive.. you did not had a backup of database? what a beginners!...
AFAIK that's not the fault from the current LEDE/OpenWrt team. Some server in hungary died and took DNS and the forum down - the person responsible had no time or interest to fix this. I can remember that quite a while before it went down, there were repeated request to at least change the DNS settings that were also ignored.
So @jow put in lot's of work and fixed what was possible to fix under these circumstances - at least that's my perspective from following the mailinglist, not sure if there are other reasons.
LEDE infra should have backups and administration is shared among several people now.