I've participated in a lot of incarnations of forums and boards over the decades. They've all changed.

Forums like gamedev used to be far more than the topical discussions. They were community hubs. While they used to include many topical discussions, the site also had a tremendous volume of social and casual conversations. We also had an extremely active IRC channel. Originally the site allowed anonymous posts, and it wasn't until 2005 that they were finally enforced (and I needed to create an account to continue posting).

In the early days, I'd say that topical discussion was about 40% of the forums, and maybe 5% of the IRC chat with the bulk being idle banter. This was true on all the forums I was on, they primarily were for “off-topic” social connections and used the “on-topic” discussions as a draw.

That changed about a decade ago, with big shifts due to social media and enormous Q&A sites.

Sites like StackOverflow (and family) and Reddit currently take most of the topics and discussion. Memes and casual banter have moved to social media platforms. The general conversation has moved to Discord. Every one of them has more focused topics, although Discord still has an awful lot of general banter.

Yup, there were some incredibly good debates about topics that managed to stay on topic for ages. Politics, religion, and other topics that usually degrade rather quickly had some long-lived and nuanced discussion.

I view it as a strength of the community, and something I miss about several communities I was in.

Here on the site, there was typically some moderation but overall people could remain on topic, staying on the issues, and discuss rationally. There were quite a few where people would intellectually recognize that each side's beliefs (political, religious, social, and more) really were beliefs about a person's feelings and often were based on life experiences. While there was often little tolerance for “because my parents said so”, there was quite a lot of tolerance for “my life experiences taught me it was so”. I remember one where a person had a genuine distrust of certain types of medicine in large part from some doctors who made poor decisions, or at least, whose decisions resulted in a poor outcome, so the person was distrustful. I disagree with their assessment, but I can understand and tolerate their differing beliefs. Quite a few religious debates were respectful of different belief systems. Politics could discuss usually with evidence why they supported certain viewpoints, but was respectful of people who had different viewpoints.

These days there's a subreddit for whatever your viewpoint is, both those supporting it and looking for an echo chamber, and also for people looking to knock the edges off and challenge beliefs.

There are plenty of good reasons for the redesign. What you described is sometimes a problem of having a unified view as the front page.

One consequence of these types of forums dying off generally --- not just here but across the Internet --- is far fewer posts and less content being generated. You can still view the individual topical forums, but many have so little content that posts to them would die in obscurity, or people would need to click into every subforum just to see a single topic posted. The unified view increased participation and exposure across the board which helped traffic and engagement, but as you noted, comes with it's own set of problems.

I think overall it was a good shift for the site because of the general numerical decline. I've seen several good discussion boards fail completely from the same decline, and we're still active and engaged.

Hit the report button when you see that kind of thing. We're constantly hit by spammers, and constantly cleaning it out. What you saw was from two spammers in the past few hours, which I just removed. There are a bunch of automated blockers, but people still get around them.