"Happy to hear suggestions on how SE23.com can help with serving the community."

When I moved here, this was the only forum and the one everyone seemed to use. Lots of useful info, good contributors etc, it was my go to place.

Times have changed and there are now a plethora of facebook groups, twitter people to follow, other social media type forums. Standing out against that is hard, but possible.

First thing all those things above have is ease of use on mobile phones, for reading, posting, uploading photos, quoting, adding links etc. I think to get enough users here, or on another forum, you will need to be able to do this, which means migrating to somethig like Discourse (not sure if you would need to start again / how to migrate users etc).

Not just mobiles, but the user experience at present on the site will not be good enough (IMO) to get enough people back, and you need a certain amount of volume of users for the site to be active.

Recommendations were extremely popular on .life - you could see which users recommended someone on a thread (on some fb groups it's always the same 3-4 people recommending the same people) so could take a view on how legitimate that reivew was. I'm not sure if it's changed, but previously on here you could not post a reply to someone asking for a recommendation. I don't understand SEO, but having a load of recommendations on a site and someone searching se23 and plumber and being directed to here (or a forum) can only be good for traffic to that forum.

There are lots of other things you need to decide on, moderation (there is one sarcastic post to a returning user - that sort of thing to decide on the tone and whether you are happy with it), how to engage with local societies (this is an area I think could be improved and never worked as well as it could have) and campaign groups but the two above would be the big ones for me.

As an open forum searchable on the web, that is one huge advantage you do have over some other social media. It might work without a software migration, but I can't see it myself, and if you don't do it, sooner or later I expect someone else might.

Good luck.