I'm sorry if I'm late, just saw this thread and since I'm a big Flarum fan I wanted to share my experience with it:
In the last 18 years I've been helping a friend run a gaming forum, around ~140 monthly users, 80 of which posting almost daily. During the years It has become more a closed community than a actual forum, it's made of people from all around the country, many are also friends IRL, it has its own slangs and inside jokes and even if many of its users bicker everyday about stupid stuff it's a daily important part of our lives. The problem was that it was running on a very old phpBB version that was slowly collapsing (running on php5) and updating it would have required to basically re-do the template as well (something my friend was not keen on doing). A lot of users gradually stopped posting in favour of social media ease of use, also not having a proper mobile version slowly became an issue on its own.
So in 2016 I started looking up for alternatives since phpBB felt too old even with the newest releases, and that's when Flarum first caught my eye and I felt immediatly in love with it. It was still the 0.1.0-beta.3 if I remember correctly, and I started pestering my friend about it. It took 6 years, the 1.0 release, a lot of tests on my end and a final blow to the phpBB instance (a SSL update on our hosting provider end basically invalidated user session almost every time somebody clicked a link) to convince my friend to finally start designing the new forum, while I was hard at work with the content migration which was our main issue. I had to import 16 years (at the time) of content, around 1 million posts, and convert all the custom formatting we had in place so a lot of string manipulation for every single post, but seeing the dev instance slowly populating itself while my mega-script was running was almost an epiphany. It took close to 2 weeks (!!) of that script continuously running on my pc for the migration to be complete (I should have spent more time on optimizing the parser lol).
We reopened the forum to the other users and everyone was overwhelmed by how Flarum works, not a single person said "it was better before" which is a lot considering that they used the old one every day for 16 years straight. The most recurring feedback was something like "now even posting here has its own gameplay".
The switch to Flarum made a lot of the old users come back as well, and basically injected a second life to the forum - in 2022 we had only 20k posts, that december we switched to Flarum and in 2023 and the postcount jumped to almost 50k, and in 2024 more than 60k.
So my friend and I are eternally grateful to you and all your hard work, and all the extension developers as well. I'm now running three different Flarum instances on my server, it has almost become a gag, when some friend of mine comes to me with some issue they expect me to say "you know what we should do? We should create a Flarum instance for that!".
I'll leave you a screenshot of the current forum, with some parts edited, because I feel it's the most good looking forum I've ever seen 😁
