Legendary XenForo is still around as well.
Unfortunately it's a commercial product and the owners seem to be willing to revoke licenses if they get bothered enough about the existence of one of their licensees, as a certain New Zealand agricultural collective discovered last year.
Flarum and Discourse are more "modern" but not proper successors to the traditional forum experience, in my opinion. They're doing something else and I don't like it.
When Discourse and Flarum first appeared infinite scroll was hailed as killer feature that will bring back the life to the forums, because navigating to next page of content supposedly was the issue that prevented people from discovering all the content. But on large forum "all threads" view will just flood the user with everything (forcing them to category selection) and neither of those two offer a way to bookmark a position on threads list (or even make it easy to just browse threads older than given date) - something that paginated threads list makes easy.
Link to prototype for interested: https://v4.misago-project.org/ Source: https://github.com/rafalp/misago-local-dev
There's a hybrid approach: One can scroll down a bit, maybe 1 page's worth of content, and thereafter, there's a Show More ... or Next button.
> classic one where there was category that stored forums
Forums inside categories? Where's that? Hmm I'm used to the opposite (categories inside a forum).
> Link to prototype
Interesting with categories to the left in their own column :- ) I've been thinking about doing that, on wide screens, in the software I'm developing
What motivates you to create Misago? / What made you start the project?
Category holds forums which hold threads/topics is "classic" way that you can find in phpBB/MyBB/FluxBB/Invision/vBulletin.
> What made you start the project?
I've used to run plenty of forums over last 15 years and I was never happy with existing solutions so I've started writing my own. I've written first forum software with PHP in high school and I am developing Misago since 2010. It's also lot of fun!
Just put the web page content onto the web page. Nobody ever died by doing that.
Care to share what this is/was about?
Go to the forums, do some searches to find threads on topics that interest you, and make your own decisions.
Just as the edgy comments are their “right to free speech”, I think it’s completely fine for XenForo to exercise their right to speech by not providing them service. It’s not like they’ve had their license revoked; they just cannot get support or software updates past when their license expires.
As an administrator I appreciated that it was easy to setup. The control panel was very powerful, and it had a very good selection of themes and add-ons. I didn't like the cost ($150/yr iirc), but it was worth it since other offerings weren't as good in my opinion. XenPorta made it simple to make an attractive blog-like homepage. XenForo's templating system let me easily customize views and CSS styling. It had a simple like system, but there were some reaction add-ons that worked very well on the forums I owned/administered.
As a user I think it has a very good UX. The editor was nice and easy to use. Animations felt polished and unobtrusive. The email templates and notification systems were very useful as a user for receiving updates. It used modals sparingly and when it did it made the UX better.
I think 2.x is a lot more polished now, although I haven't used it much. I felt that 1.x required a few add-ons and a custom theme to be fully-featured, but with those add-ons it couldn't be beat. I think even modern forum systems could learn a lot from XenForo, but my opinion is of course biased since I'm so familiar with XenForo.