I'm going to break rank a little here and give you some responses that may or may not be my viewpoint alone - and not necessarily the moderation team's as a whole.
Was this thread meant to be open for replies?
Yeah. A common issue has been the lack of transparency and general communication on our end; this is obvious with threads like this one posted by Aslion. The thing with transparency is that it needs to go both ways in my opinion; it's one thing for us to say and apologise for certain things, but it's also important for the community to give feedback on what we've suggested.
The community of the now is a very different one to ten, even twenty years ago. Smaller perhaps, and because of that we might not necessarily need to play by the same hand of site staff of the past - i.e. a strict, rigid enforcer attitude isn't going to work in 2023 even if it may have in 2007, 2013, etc. I also think being proactive and reactive is pivotal now as well - we need to figure out what works for the greater good of the community. Whether that's by trial and error, I'm unsure.
These are the two points I'm the most worried about, if I'm being honest. Setting up project related spaces in the discord is a good idea, but if that expands further in scope then there is a huge risk of it eating up activity that would otherwise be on the forum board. Which, speaking of, forum boards are somewhat of a dying breed. The discord server is more than active enough, but that does not really translate to the forum as much. A lot of the discussion is happening rapid fire there instead in contrast to here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I'd not want to see the forum dying since I think it's a better format for certain kinds of discussion.
It'll be interesting to see how the scope of project channels work; I absolutely agree forum boards are a dying breed courtesy of social media, Discord etc. Discussion on Discord being "rapid fire" is something that I also agree with; quest updates might get buried beneath memes, shitposting, general conversation etc as well.
I feel the current quest project system serves a purpose, and it does it well; it's a balancing act in my opinion. It's as much a matter of having the project channel for those bursts of updates/content but still using the quest projects on the site for everything else they do currently.
The codebase not being sustainable is quite bad. Ideally someone would have made minor updates to it over the years to keep it running, but that seems unlikely. Changing to a new type of software means uprooting everything, which will likely not be easy for a wide variety of reasons. Not that I don't understand the need, but the question of what to change too is likely a sticking point. There's few forum board softwares that are in active development anymore, I can only think of one on top of my head.
I'd recommend *against* going the modern route and going with a WordPress implemented system. They are not ideal for something to install and forget about it, the software auto-updates, and can break plugin compatibility unless you keep track of it all. Not to mention that because it's so wide spread used, it also gets the most wide spread attacks against it.
I already touched on this in a post yesterday, but I'm feeling I'd be in a similar position to you. What forum software would even be in active development in 2023? For what it's worth, I absolutely suspect newer iterations of IPB are locked behind a subscription model, and it'd be hard to believe that any alternatives that would be in development would not be behind a subscription paywall either. That itself would open up a whole other can of worms, with questions like "how do we pay for the website to stay up?", "do we go back to ads?", or as I shudder, "do we introduce a PureZC Gold Plus membership scheme"?
On the contrary, the forums break whenever it's someone's birthday, the mobile version is limited in functionality, you can't post tied winners of contests like Screen Rebirth and SotW on the front page (despite there being an option to declare a winning entry as a tie on the control panel), and I'm sure there's dozens of other bugs, issues and whatnot that others on the moderating team could rattle off of the top of their heads. The big thing to remember too is that David and Russ only just got access to the backend from LtM towards the end of last year; so goodness knows how much work there is to do in that regard.