Sorry everyone, we are still making progress with our plans to migrate the server.
Thank you for the update. 
We apologize for the forum issues, which are mostly due to the ancient server the software resides on.
I can say that stuff is starting to happen on the back-end, and hopefully, we’ll be seeing improvements in the very near future!
Thanks folks. It seems to be working much better and I’ve had no problems searching, etc. 
Cheers.
My experience has been the exact opposite. Search (including the “View active topics” link) is unavailable almost all the time. I’m still constantly getting the “Please try again later” message.
Sorry to report that it’s the same for me. I can’t search most times I try. Occasionally if I refresh the page enough I can get through. Sounds like you’re working on it. Thank you!
Well, I have to say it’s back to it’s former problems too. No worries. I have my towel …
Yes, it’s very bad. Hopefully this will be completely resolved when we switch to a new server, whether or not we change the forum software. Though honestly I am beginning to think that one of the advantages of Discourse would be that you wouldn’t need a special search for recent posts.
You don’t need a special search for new posts if you login.
Any board that has new posts is highlighted by the icon on the left hand side.
Then if you click on that, any new posts are shown by the icon against them also on the left.
By clicking on the little arrow there, you are taken to the first unread message in that thread.
The rest can be marked as read by clicking the “Mark topics read” link on the top right.
Easy.
Sure, but that’s like three clicks for each board with unread posts. When the “unread post” search is working, you get a list of the unread posts all at once without having to dive into each individual forum.
That’s as maybe. I prefer to choose which fora I look at and then select only those posts that I want. Doing it my way works for me. I use the same approach on other fora that I use too. That way I don’t end up with a lot of disjointed and out of order posts where the ones I want are lost in a sea of words.
To each their own I suppose. Also at my age I prefer to not having to change habits if I can.
Discourse does let you customize what categories and individual threads you track with about five granular levels of detail! 
As I said earlier, my foray into DISCOURSE left me floundering when on my PC. I had another look at it last night on a mobile as we had no power to run a PC or anything else for that matter. The screen layout on a mobile looks better but I find the screen too small to read without eye-strain. If the PC version is presented without too much clutter and there are setting to “do it my way” then if that is the way everyone wants to jump, then I at least will try to come to grips with it. But if there is a vote as to which is implemented, then consider that both my hands would be in the air and waving for the phpBB version.
Is there an estimate as to when all this might happen as yet or are you all still in the testing phase?
Still testing.
We are discussing live dates now.
You can check out the two test instances to see what we’ve been up to. Please remember that both instances had data imported from a previous date and will not include the most recent messages posted here on the live forum. Also, feel free to test logging in (you might need to change your password on Discourse) and the board functions.
Feel free to try out all the features, but be aware any new posts, settings, and PMs you update on the test servers will be wiped when it goes live as all up-to-date posts from here will be re-imported. Make sure you copy any significant discussions that need to be retained here or keep a copy of them yourself to re-post after the changeover.
Discourse: test.intfiction.org/
phpBB: forum.661.org/