The FR site loads quickly. Good for phone modems. Easy for me to read an article and responses.
I don’t see the need for a change.
Give an example (URL) of a very user-friendly forum site; I’ll visit it at your recommendation.
There are thousands to choose from. Some of my favorite sites use the vBulletin platform. But rather than point you to a specific site using vBulletin, I suggest the vBulletin Community Forum itself:
vBulletin Community Forum
Full-featured and flexible, vBulletin offers a smorgasboard of features in an attractive, easy-to-use package. Here's their homepage, which would be equivalent to the FR homepage:
vBulletin Homepage
On second thought, here's a real-life community using vBulletin that I frequent:
LX Forums
So much easier to read, post, and search. I know for a small percentage of users dialup vs. broadband is still an issue, and modern sites like those built with vBulletin allow for that. Just choose the low-bandwidth version of the site, which the software automatically builds parallel to the main site. Not sure if that even is an issue, since that's pretty much a question of content (I've seen some pretty large graphics files - even on FR).
My point is, forum software has advanced to the point (quite awhile ago, actually) where it is now a plug-and-play proposition using off the shelf software. Just add content. A site like FR in its current incarnation, which is obviously a custom "one size does not fit all" implementation, may be romantic. But user friendly and attractive it ain't. We could do so much better. It must be awfully laborious just to
maintain this site, much less add functionality. This site is a dinosaur in technical terms. Just look around.
Here's a vBulletin site called the Liberty Lounge, so you can get an idea what a political discussion forum looks like:
Liberty Lounge
Try joining one of these sites, read and post a message or two. I'd be surprised if you didn't enjoy it more and find it takes less time than FR. And, you can
do much, much more (and more easily).
I'm not affiliated with vBulletin - I just like it.