I feat that the forum may suffer considerable from the change. I've seen over the years a number of bicycle, resp. hobby oriented, forums loose their critical mass following similarly massive changes--- more than a few, unfortunately, never overcame their fall. For a forum to survive it must overcome a basic threshold of traffic in individual threads. In this light, I think, its quite important to try to increase traffic and activity as soon as possible--- even if that means stooges (a number of sites do use shills to inflate a sense of activity!).
I feat that the forum may suffer considerable from the change. I've seen over the years a number of bicycle, resp. hobby oriented, forums loose their critical mass following similarly massive changes--- more than a few, unfortunately, never overcame their fall. For a forum to survive it must overcome a basic threshold of traffic in individual threads. In this light, I think, its quite important to try to increase traffic and activity as soon as possible--- even if that means stooges (a number of sites do use shills to inflate a sense of activity!).