What's wrong with this forum?

Part of the issue seems to be but they’ve implemented a forum that is totally custom. That sounds like it’s really good because you should know every in an out of the forum and be able to customise it to do exactly what you want. But the reality is that the people who made this for them probably no longer work for Nas or maybe were contractors who never worked for them in the first place.

some forums struggle when they get really large with lots of posts. Or if you don’t know The forum well and it’s code and  you change one tiny thing and it breaks lots of other things in other places. In many ways it’s better to use open source well-established off-the-peg forums like PHPBB3. Yes they are a little less flexible out of the box. But there are a lot of add-ons you can download to add extra behaviour. And because they’re widely used by so many different other websites, and because there’s a community contributing to fixing bugs, off-the-peg forums tend to be much more stable.

Part of the issue seems to be but they’ve implemented a forum that is totally custom. That sounds like it’s really good because you should know every in an out of the forum and be able to customise it to do exactly what you want. But the reality is that the people who made this for them probably no longer work for Nas or maybe were contractors who never worked for them in the first place.

some forums struggle when they get really large with lots of posts. Or if you don’t know The forum well and it’s code and  you change one tiny thing and it breaks lots of other things in other places. In many ways it’s better to use open source well-established off-the-peg forums like PHPBB3. Yes they are a little less flexible out of the box. But there are a lot of add-ons you can download to add extra behaviour. And because they’re widely used by so many different other websites, and because there’s a community contributing to fixing bugs, off-the-peg forums tend to be much more stable.

It's a very old-fashioned forum as well. Appreciate they run it for us, but to not even have a block button for people is a bit alarming. In the past there have been some quite deranged people posting far-right invective and they were just allowed to run riot with zero consequences.