So really what I'm missing currently is an internal ticket system. A place where someone can press a button and then privately reach out to staff in order to raise an issue. This mostly impacts gaming communities I think as it has been raised in the past here once. We have a contact form on the forum now but it really is no replacement for an instant messaging ticket system. I'd rather avoid third-party options not only for privacy and security but primarily so that it is integrated into our current platform.

But this is just one of many issues that will need to be overcome in the near future. Moving away from discord is incredibly difficult. Not only is it free but it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your community. It's meant for this purpose and it does it really well.

As I mentioned there was a deprecated plugin for this. This plugin allowed you to create a category where the posts could only be viewed by the author and authorised groups. This would have been a perfectly viable solution however it is over a decade old now.

(nodebb-plugin-support-forum is the name of the plugin)

I wholeheartedly support the step back to forums. The only problem I am having with it is providing real-time dedicated (and most importantly private) support to individual users. This is something that was crucial to many communities over at Discord where you were spoiled for choice in terms of solutions to this.

NodeBB doesn't really have a solution to this as far as I can tell. I've been looking for several days but the only option I can see, other than contact forms which do not meet the required specs, is a deprecated plugin that isn't readily available on the ACP.

A real issue that NodeBB is going to face if it wants to step up against Discord is, as has been discussed already, the issue of everything being all in one place. That's what Discord did well and that's what it cornered the market on. No network of platforms is going to replace that. It has to be centralised. A forum obviously can't replace the voice channels of Discord but it can excel for text based communications. However, it needs to be a complete package in that regard and flexible to the needs of people coming over from Discord.