A half year passed, are here any news?
I just got email with good news. A server will be available before the end of the week. It will take some time to move the forum over ofcourse, but at least I can start this process this weekend.
Thanks. ¿Where will you make the anounce when it’s ready?
Without to blame anybody, but when will HTTPS be finally available? 
Thank you for pushing me on this, I agree it needs to be done. You can -if you want- blame me, but I have a little baby and simply don’t get around to wrap this up. (Half) an hour here and there isn’t enough to get up to speed.
The old forum is now in GitHub and I’ve checked-out the latest forum locally.
What needs to be done next is to adapt the forum to the requirements (e.g. authentication against OSM API), check in the changes and test them on the new server.
I hope to make some progress in the last week of June when I have holidays.
Question for Git guru’s:
The OSM forum is a branch of the fluxbb-1.4.8 branch and it’s own changes. The latest stable forum version is fluxbb-1.5.6 which is 200+ commits away from the current OSM forum. What is the best way to I proceed including (some) of the OSM forum changes into the latest release? Should I just activate the latest release and add the changes manually or is using some sort of merge the best way to go?
You see, I don’t have much experience with Git yet.
No guru, but sharing my thought to try to push this 
Imho this is a matter of taste.
If you are used to SVN (ant the like), you’re probably also used to a linear history. If you prefer this you should rebase your branch. This basically reverts all your commits, switches to the latest official release and reapplies your changes commit by commit. On each conflict the rebase halts, you can fix that conflict and continue to rebase until all your work is applied to the latest release. In the end, you have one long linear history where everything you’ve done is applied on top of the latest release. For huge changes for a long period of time on your side this might however produce some headache, as the conflicts might be complicated.
You could also use cherry-pick, which is kind of the “manual” way of doing it. Checkout the latest release and afterwards cherry-pick one commit after the other. This is useful if you don’t need all your old patches but just a few of them and produces a linear history, too. However, probably that’s not what you want.
If you are open to the new use a “normal” merge. This will produce a new commit that has two parents. One parent is the latest release, one contains your local changes. Of course this might also produce conflicts, but in the end you have a commit “graph” which better reflects the way you worked. You had two branches in the beginning and your goal is to get to a common state again, thus a merge.
I hope this lengthy but not so detailed text helps
Is there a staging server where you can test any version such as the mentioned merge without affecting the production environment?
Up!
I created a fork of your repo, merged the latest fluxbb-1.5.7 into the master branch and then created a new branch * OpenStreetMap_forum.1.5.7* based on that updated master.
Then I started to git cherry-pick your changes (except for the language packs). There were some conflicts along the way I had to resolve. Also, I did a small test run on my local machine with authentication against osm.org, which worked ok right from the start.
As the number of changes is not that large, I think it is still feasible to apply all of your changes manually.
For your reference, here’s a link to my test branch: https://github.com/mmd-osm/openstreetmap-forum/tree/OpenStreetMap_forum.1.5.7
mmd, this is awesome! Thanks for your initiative, it is very welcome.
tbsprs, mmd has made my life a bit easier, luckily my baby is sleeping better now so I have ~2 hours to spare in the evenings again. The forum is back on the top of my to-do list again.
@tbsprs, there is a staging server (not accessible outside my local network). It has the old forum running with a forum db backup.
@mmd, the new forum is working on my private server on top of an forum db backup.
@mmd, I’m going to look it up too, but can you tell me how I get your changes in my repository?
So, currently I have a patched and up to date FluxBB forum running on my private server. I’ve contacted OSM admins to see if there is still a server available and to prepare the move.
I’m told that the server which is reserved for the forum is currently powered-down due to a power shortage in the rack earlier this year. It will take some time to get it running again.
Nice.
New information indicates that early next week the new server should be available again so tests can begin.
How is it going?
How long is “a while”? More than two years?
The server is still waiting for work? How long does he still have to wait?
is there still anything in progress?
While I full respect the hard work of the admins, but IMHO we were pretty patient for 2 years on this issue. Today, we still leak our OSM credentials via unsecured HTTP at the forum login.
Please check, how to switch to HTTPS only! It’s 2016 and letsencrypt is ready for production. Maybe it’s better to work with an non unified certificate hierachie, than ever user of the forum is endangered