Do you still use proper classic forums for what purposes/topics/types of communities?

Yeah a lot of pro audio discussion still happens on gearspace (formerly gearslutz), KVR, dogsonacid, etc

The forums on the metal archives are still active and a good resource for various different things concerning extreme metal. Bits of news, discussion, and some out of left field recommendations that I don't find other places.

Permanently Deleted

Easiest one that comes to mind is the archlinux.org forums. It pops up constantly in searches, even if youre not searching for an arch specific problem, so I used it even before daily driving arch. Now I have an account on there and have made a few posts seeking help. Most of the time though someone has already asked it, and someone else has already provided a solution.

Yes I use quite a few and mostly started using them again this past year. The thing that made the big difference was finding the app Hermit. It let's me have something akin to a separate browser per forum that is fixed to that URL. I then have a bunch of shortcuts on my home screen, one per forum. It made using forums so much easier and streamlined.

This one. I don't like the other things you mention. I did join a sub reddit on the topic years ago, but it was awful. Full of people who didn't know anything of the subject, but were very willing to downvote.

I can't say I really use any of the older style BBS ones like phpBB but there are plenty of smaller software communities using Discourse based forums. For less active communities they are far superior to Discord due to the more asynchronous nature and gives you a lot more control than Reddit/Lemmy.

My RPG club, still use a forum. It's there to organized games and discuss about RPG 

After ditching Reddit I found most of the car centric subreddit content was just coming from forums that survived because car people were inherently old school, even for EVs. So if you want to know the latest about EV trucks there’s forums for Rivian, Cybertruck, and Lightning. The trouble is that they are all very tribal, so getting unbiased info seems harder. I’m also a fan of older jeeps and they are full of problems, but almost all of them have answers on these forums from the early 2000s with links to geocities pages. Hopefully someone detailed the answer and only linked for supporting details.

I still do use a few. First one is local one about bass guitars, mainly going there for the great community. Second is another local about PC and hardware. Now thinking about it, I rarely visit others.

Hot rod/muscle car guys still use forums. There's some good ones that I use for old Mopar stuff.

Aviation types still hang out on Pprune.org.

No, but I would like to.

Rarely, i only check rateyourmusic foeum from timw to time that's all

Rate Your Music and MusicBrainz both use traditional forums, though I haven’t really posted in them lately. I also joined EndeavourOS’ forums at the time I joined Lemmy.

For a bit now I’ve been thinking of starting a small classic style of forum, using the top forum software (to my knowledge at least — xenForo) and writing a custom extension for it to add ActivityPub to it

Idk, I’ve realized that I don’t have a whole lot of time to keep up with live chat communities (like Discord, etc) so I started throwing the forum idea around

I use xss(.)is for unique tech stuff.

Unofficial DOS Master of Magic forums. It includes subforums for modded versions, including the most excellent Caster of Magic.

The cs.rin.ru forum needs more love. The people there are awesome at helping out the worldwide community get easy access to things. Great place overall.

https://www.cloudynights.com/ is probably the best astronomy community about, the subreddit never compared.

sp7pki for amateur radio

I dread it everytime I need to use it because it's a dump but there's nothing better in Poland

The Artix Linux Forums is the only one I frequent these days.

Any good Linux distro worth their salt has their own version of this. Other platforms just don't cut it when you need support or have a question specific to your distro specific needs.

Otherwise I very very rarely pop in on Linux Questions or Neovim Discourse to just peruse.

Interesting forums like The Indie Stone have caught my eye as being active for the very niche topic of talking specifically about the Project Zomboid video game, so there is that.

Forums aren't completely dead, but, sadly, they are starting to go the way of the email mailing lists and irc channels. Still alive...but barely so.

The scifi fantasy community still had a ton of these active till now.

There’s one niche dev forum I go on, but only when I have a problem or when it shows up in search results. I used to visit it occasionally but it doesn’t get much traffic