Improvement of the new forum?

TL;DR nobody cares about power users anymore, and from every company's POV, forums are for reducing the cost of support. I wish Garmin had used NodeBB, which is a modern forum platform for power users....

---

While I agree with everything you said, the only reason companies like Garmin (and Microsoft, Apple, etc.) even have forums is to reduce the cost of support. They save $$$ when users support each other -- period. Which is why I've argued that we are actually doing Garmin a favour by using the forums and not the other way around.

The fact that they got rid of the top-level general discussion forums for running, cycling and swimming does reinforce the idea that they want this to be about user-to-user support and nothing else. Every remaining sub-forum (outside of the developer forum) is directly related to a Garmin product.

And look at how runnersworld dumped their forums and switched to FB groups. So they basically threw away years of interesting threads (some of which were years-long) and traded for a platform that really can't handle any discussion longer than a few days or a few dozen replies. Because companies don't feel like spending their money giving users a place to talk to each other, when they can just use a huge, lowest-common-denominator platform for free.

I think the old forum platform had a ton of problems, including outdated aesthetics (*), terrible mobile usability, slowness, and tons of bugs. There were 3-4 ways to post images and none of them worked properly.

(*) This is actually strongly related to usability, especially on mobile. Old forums with a lot of distracting UI elements are harder to use IMO, and the wasted space used by some of these elements makes them harder to use on mobile.

However, the new forum "fixed" some of these problems by dumbing-down and removing features to the point of uselessness. Try browsing a long thread with hundreds of replies now -- with infinite scroll and no way to randomly jump to a given point in the thread or save your position, you're likely to give up after 30 seconds. No different than trying to read FB, Twitter, IG or Disqus threads with 100s or 1000s of replies. It's built that way by design -- to be "simple" at the cost of functionality, and to hide any content that isn't new or highly upvoted.

You can't even search within a single thread anymore. The new forum was def not made with long discussions in mind.

I've said this before, but I wish Garmin had looked at a modern forum platform like NodeBB which is obviously aimed at power users, while still being mobile-first and having social features (upvotes/downvotes). It's got infinite scroll (with the option of pagination), but it also has a nav bar so you can jump to any position in the discussion and save your position easily, even when using infinite scroll (I wish every "infinite scroll" site/app had this). It also has both pseudo-threaded /nested reply view combined with linear view, so you can see replies in chronological order. And it works well on mobile. I've seen discussions on NodeBB-powered forums that have 10k posts, and it works well. Good luck skimming through anything over a few dozen posts on this platform.

And for some reason, this platform loses features on mobile, which is strange for a supposedly modern platform. And ironically, some of the features (like quoting or posting code), are overly-complicated or restrictive. 

Oh and features like reply notifications don't even seem to work (or maybe they're deliberately disabled?) which makes the forum even harder to use.