James, I'll go ahead and repost this in the open letter thread, and fyi it's being open so contributions such as this one are very much welcome.

@1, what forum software will you use assuming this does go forward? I'm quite curious

@6, I very much disagree. Discourse would be a prime target for a forum like this. It has everything that you guys need -- there's a way to send messages and you actually get notifications, people can flag particular posts for moderation purposes and people can choose to see it or not, it has a warning system, push notifications... Everything you'd need in a modern forum. I don't think the "Oh we have people with crappy hardware or bad internet" argument is applicable here, and IMO its perfectly reasonable to move on to better things. Other international forums have already done so -- the Rust, XWiki, and Ioquake forums are just three examples, and I can probably find more trivially. The internet has moved far beyond static web pages and its not going to sit around and wait for people using ancient braillenotes or people running Windows 95 to catch up and upgrade, and I don't see a reason why we should either.
As for scripts, that's not really an issue unless your still on something like dial up. Scripts are designed to be (usually) quite tiny, and modern browsers support asynchronous script loading so the loading process doesn't slow the rest of the page from loading. I think that even someone who's on a 200 kbps down internet plan could handle Discourse, although it might be slow for them. Again, though, there's no reason we should use ancient forum software just for those people. We can't accommodate everyone and everything. Discourse is a fine option for the forum, IMO. (As an example of how non-applicable that argument is, I usually get 300-500 kBPS down here at home for right now and I can still use Discourse forums and Gmail's standard view (and I hate standard view, mind), and Gmail in particular is very script heavy.)

Slightly off topic, but would someone have to have created the note at the top of the forum, or was it just system generated?

@10, Thanks.

The one potential problem is that we're on a dedicated host. Discourse only supports installation in a Docker container, so the host would have to install it for us. Which means, if the site owners do get back to us, discourse might be out of the question.

At this point, the web hosts have made their intentions plain. Which is to say that they don't give a damn about this place anymore. Which is honestly fine. They made a thing that had a number of good years. I think they could have handled things a bit better than just straight up disappearing unless something critical came along, but it is what it is. Even if they do get back to us now, why do we want to stay with them unless of course, they hand everything off the to the current admin team? I think we're well past an apology and a promise to be a bit more diligent.

I've never cared much about forum software to see what I've been on when I use other forums. I don't, therefore, have any opinions about Discourse. I will say this, however. Most forum software is a navigational annoyance. Yes it's doable, but most of the time, you're having to find your own way to jump between posts, because each one is in a table that in itself is part of a list that it part of a board which is another item in a longer list. So, whatever solution y'all decide to go for, I hope that it either is a bit more accessible than that, or it can be made so.

While I understand the need to adapt, I don't think we should get stuck with something that's a royal pain to use. Maybe we won't get as lucky and have everything broken out by headings, but something should be done to make sure we have a means of being able to navigate better than jumping by random graphics, jumping by list elements and hoping they take you somewhere close to where you want to be, or at worst, searching for some text that you know is at the header of each post.

@16, right, which is why we should accept the OPs offer. Its a really good one and is pretty much a no-brainer in this instance.

I’d say give it a month or two. If we don’t hear anything then, then it might be a good thing to get things going.

Maybe they’re not responding to emails anymore? Maybe they change their email address? Assuming they’re living at the same place they’ve always been, it would probably be hard to miss a letter.

@21, the letter was never mailed -- nobody even knows their mailing addresses. And, TBH, I'd say just go for it and damn the webmasters here. On countless occasions we've tried reaching out to them and on pretty much every occasion they have failed to get back to us within a reasonable time frame. We reached out to them on the copyright problem. We reached out to them when we started suffering forum errors. We reached out to them a month or two ago. I'm sure others have reached out to them as well. And nothing. If they truly gave a damn about this place, they'd, uh, actually take part in its administration. The ship of peacefully contacting the admins has already sailed, IMO. I'd say turn this place into a historical archive and go elsewhere. Lock registrations and logins and only allow guest access so that we can view historical information. Take the OPs offer and set up a forum that's ran by the actual forum admins -- admins who actually give a damn about this place and don't pop in every 10 years to make tiny micro-changes and then vanish.