What happened to the old forum? Still can be accessed in the archive, though.
I've been away from openwrt forums some a while, I found my user no longer existed, and this new interface which provides poor organization and barely any reading contrast, it's like reading a notepad file with all messages there, almost no categories, dumping everything in the same bucket
Please don't fall for that modern crappy stuff everyone is dying for, priorizing design over practicality!
I also wanted to add some hacking details to the wiki, of course my account is disabled there too...
Why there's no more hardware hacking section? That was the best part of all!
This forum is running on "Discourse". It's a controversial forum software choice in many communities. I personally think there are lots of good parts, but also lots of annoying parts to it too.
I have seldom seen a Discourse site last more than a few years (other than those hosted by the Discourse company itself, which I believe they do pro bono for a few communities?). It's apparently quite resource demanding and expensive to run.
Whatever my immediate issues: I always worry more about the long term with websites. I've lost some forums over the years that I used to participate in and it's a pain when you can't reference important files or discussions in them. Many forbid web crawlers (like Archive.org) because of page access costs (big databases).
Total data loss and no backups sometime after the OpenWrt/LEDE fork. We didn't have access to the server running the old forum back then, so we were forced to start over and reassemble an archive of the old forum from cached pages on Google and Bing...
You could try switching to a dark theme. Alternatively you may use the mail interface to interact with the forum.
If you have specific suggestions for categories, the @moderators would like to hear them. I don't see an issue with introducing new categories (depends on the moderators though as users often do not bother to chose one on creating threads).
This discourse community here is running since over 6 years already and hosted by ourselves at DigitalOcean using sponsored credits. So far the resource demands are reasonable.
This Discourse instance is available on the internet archive:
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Good to hear, thankyou 
Hi I agree that most forums on Discourse are a pane to use. As a screen reader user some times I just cant use them. They can be so bad! The OpenWrt admins have dun there best to make it usable for me and if there is things you don't like or have trouble with then they will try and help you out if they can. I hated it at first, but now I am more familiar with the lay out I can get around the forums quite fast. Any way glad to see you back around and I look foreword to seeing you post around the place. Happy flashing!
Fun fact: It was exclusively Bing that saved the content from being lost to the ages. Google does cache but is itself incredibly hostile to being scraped, Bing doesn't have any qualms with it. I could scrape some 45,000 cached pages from Bing, parse them for data (I think I remember it cached three or four different forum layouts and markups), and from that data create what you now see as the old forum archive.
Whether by design or by accident, the old forum did not have any file uploads, not even image uploads. We lost about half the content, mainly in very old threads, and ... the user avatar images, I didn't bother to scrape and integrate them into the output.
However, we actually put some effort into making sure the forum topics remained at their old URI, even though the forum archive is not an actual forum (it just looks like one). There's even a redirect to the forum archive from this forum, based on the URI format.
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I'd mainly add some more categories ex. Hardware, then sub-categories by brand (tplink, etc) or cpu (Broadcom, Atheros...).
I know handling a big forum it's no easy job!
@takimata what a job! How did you manage to parse and recover the data from bing?
That was crazy amount of effort!