I think these exact thoughts often, and can't make my mind up. Don't think we should scrap it and not sure it warrants any time either.

That forum is all about film industry demographic who are accustomed to the software, who, might be averse to Phabricator. Updating Phab might allow us to think differently about how it's gonna be received.

So should we freeze the forums until phabricator is updated?

Well even though it seems we've got little control over how Phabricator looks it would be best for all comms to remain here, in one place. If we're gonna accomplish that we're gonna have to either configure a more unified 'front page' with a forum-like appearence or create some other sort of system to integrate the site and the labs. At the moment it seems that people don't know how to make sense of this place, so let's see what an upgrade does to appearences and available plug-ins/applications.

So should we freeze the forums until phabricator is updated?

If you want to. I would have just left it. Is this something to do with server upgrade I guess. Yeah I suppose so, I think it would only ever move to any degree once the cameras were shipping certainly.

The problem currently is that we are collecting spam in the forums and have to manually clean up after it constantly - that spam might get us blacklisted in search engines...

Definitely in favour of reducing problems where possible. Whatever happens if we could make some sort of save so that if we ever want to re-employ it then that task is made easier for having done so.

At this point I'd probably endorse the notion of scrapping it for Discourse further down the line if it's needed. phpbb is a bastard to admin - click this click that click this click that click this click that, it's 2017.

the "freeze" would basically mean we set the forum read-only for now and in the future we can at any time decide to revive it.

Sure. Let's reappraise the forum closer to shipping.