Hey, I think it would be pretty cool if these forums were migrated to discourse. Discourse is a more modern/more actively-developed forum software with a much better design, support for markdown, badges, SSO (sign in to forums with BMG account), etc.
Her'es some existing communities to get a feel for the UI:
https://eve.community/
https://community.cloudflare.com/
https://meta.discourse.org/
Discourse can be self-hosted (ran on your own servers), or it can be managed by the Discourse non-profit hosting at https://discourse.org.
Also, for the forum operator, there is a way to migrate phpbb content to discourse: https://meta.discourse.org/t/importing-from-phpbb3/30810