This is very interesting.
The first time I reached this forum I found it was rather dull and was going to suggest you changing it for Discourse. I then thought it was best not to meddle but I think about that everytime I get here. So, thanks for reading my mind.
I ran a Discourse forum for our National Architect's Association elections. We started as a small group of 6 and eventually grew to the needed numbers. The forum was meant to be a way of engaging a discussion between people in our list and voters. In the end we lost. It was not because of Discourse, of course.
After discussing it with them they offered the Discourse site to me as an Opensource account, which is free and setup by them. They are very interesting and very supportive. Support and interaction by email is given by them in their own Discourse Meta forum. If you send them emails the emails are actually going to the forum so the support team reads them in a forum like fashion. Very cool, and great potential. If you choose to reach their own pubklic Discourse Forum, community will give you support too. All are very friendly and fast to respond. The community seems to be very active and a lot of community made plugins are being developed. I don't know if you find that insteresting as you have skills that I don't and can probably assemble the forum yourselves and thus can have more control. For me, I needed nothing else than what was installed by default.
Discourse ran perfectly and the backstage was very easy to configure. I never worried about a thing and everything was always update. As I had everything setup and maintained by Discourse themselves on their servers for free, it was seamless
Any file can be allowed to be uploaded as long as you setup the filters to allow it . I guess uploading an IFC.js will have no issues. Images can be customized too and you can either autocompress them or allow them to have full resolution.
From an admin perspective, the main benefit I found was the Social Media interaction. We had a social media guy that would pick posts that we composed in Discourse and then sent them directly to Social sites like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. There are plugins to make the bridge to the social networks you choose to. This bridge is processed automatically and effectively, linking back Twitter posts or facebook posts, for instance, to the forum automatically. If a post features an image, that image is the base of the external media post. This allowed for a very streamlined and overall nice looking cross posting from the forum to Social networks. It was, for him, the biggest benefit.
I chose discourse because it was the main forum type I was using before and I rather enjoyed it. I like it much more than this one and much more than other kind of forums I before. I used quite a few over the years. From my user perspective, Discourse is the more intuitive and fluid to use that I tried. @dimitar put it very well, but the main user benefits are:
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Quotes are excellent, while here they are confusing (quotes is very important in forum discussions imho);
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Easier post formatting for the user and auto preview while typing;
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Reference to similar discussions while you're posting;
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Guidance when you start using it;
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Clearer UI;
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External linking is very streamlined and shows nice previews of the sites/resources you link to;
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Cross posting and referencing is very nice;
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Flagging posts system works very well;
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Private messaging works nicely;
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Forum login via google account or many other accounts;
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Badges, which might seem ridiculous at first view, are a nice touch.
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Even the reactions to posts are simpler and better and you can tag one post as the solution to the initial post and then both are read together.
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Getting to the last read post or finding posts you have had an interest before is very simple;
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Finding related posts works very well.
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Message system is great too;
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Very long threads are very nicelly simplified, showing you only the main posts in the thread. Of course you can turn this off to view everything.
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It allows for an app to be created in the phone/tablet of the user if he so wishes. I only had this for my own Discourse, but it made the interaction with it much simpler as I didn't require opening the web browser anymore.
I'd definetely recommend Discourse above all other forum experiences I had.
