So all of the forums actually still exist, in the legacy area. If they mapped well into the news organization, we could've kept them open as-is. But given that they didn't we decided to start fresh on most of them. The Pocket Panel forum was already pretty focused on that, so we just decided to map it as-is into the new structure.
The better question really is: How did we manage to get the data out of a broken, unsupported forum with everything intact? The answer to that involves something like a half dozen hops across different versions of various brands of forum software. It was a tangled path, which is one reason it took a while to get back up and running, but we finally made it.