long story short: new member registration is open, and forum package has been updated.

short story long: For the past couple years I wasn't doing anything with the forum for a couple of reasons:

A) The spam registrations by bots had gotten out of hand, 50 a day, I didn't want to deal with that anymore.
B) The forum package I was using had gotten out of date and things were breaking, until finally I could not even get in to the admin section anymore.

A month ago I decided to see if I could transfer it to a new package myself using AI to help me. It was quite a bit of work for a week, but I got it done, and it was free. And it has better spam protection.

Ultimately there are going to be some differences, and some things could not be recovered, but at least we can move forward again. Still, if you see something missing or not working, let me know, I'll see if it something recoverable or fixable.