Actually, canoetripping appears to be a fairly standard forum format, and if you look closely at the bottom of the page this particular forum is marketed by https://www.vbulletin.com 

For Sound Rowers, I'm simply going to migrate our existing Yahoo content over to groups.io - all the old content is preserved, in theory, and the platform is much more workable and stable than Yahoo. 

If we really want a full-fledged forum, I would first look into plug-ins for our website. We are not that chatty a group however (certainly by WhatcomPaddlers standards!). Plus Reivers is right, migrating existing content would likely be difficult at best, and likely not possible at all. The Facebook crowd seems to be growing well, and that and the other social media sites seem to be where the majority of online conversations are taking place these days.

And for the record, I was a Usenet junkie long before the world wide web....!

Steve, &Traci...
The canoetripping forum looks like custom built forum.  Absolutely beautifully done.  My guess is that there is (or was) a deep techie who loves paddling that built this bulletin board from scratch.  That person (or team) might be long gone by now.  It would be a major task for any yahoogroup to migrate over to canoetripping.  For example: they might not want it, or we would be a subgroup, or moving old posts and data not possible.  

Forums in general are older than the web.  When internet (connected computers) was only found at campuses and research facilities, they started creating BBS (bulletin boards) that hosted messages to a small member community.  None of us want to create a BBS from scratch.  Today there are dozens, typically dedicated to a single interest area.  The big names like yahoo, google, reddit, etc.  have 'hardened' their structure for their own best interests.  Since Yahoo has been bought by Verizon we are seeing a change in priority.  Yahoo is mining their group hosting systems for advertising and data collection.  There is a moderator group within yahoogroups for those of us who manage these groups.  The early indications are that yahoogroups will no longer be supported.  Of course yahoo (or Verizon) would never acknowledge this.  There are a whole ass-ton of customers involved, so like, can you say "Bad Publicity"?   When I started whatcompaddlers it was much easier to find archived messages.  But yahoo has dropped the message identification and no longer supports message topic or text searches.  I know of no other way to preserve older messages.  As it is today, even though this move preserves old messages, they are nearly impossible to find.  There are over 13 years of messages at a volume of 100 plus messages per month.   And some of these are actually not worth worrying about.  Except mine.  My messages will remain awesome for all time.  And yours.  And ... well. you can see where this goes.  Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_forums

rd