There will always be rants if you change. STW survived a short period of being offline, and starting from scratch. But then it did have paid subs etc.
The other forum which I used that went offline for a week, also starting afresh, never properly recovered, then a friend of mine bought it and it recovered a bit, then he sold it to someone that tried to monetise forums. Still didn’t recover, and when that monetising guy got out of the business and sold everything the company acquiring forums struck that one out of the contract and told him to keep it. Now it makes STW look devoid of ads, probably has more ads per page than users per day.
Changing forum s/w completely will purge, imho, 80% of the non-regular, non-subscription userbase.
back on topic, Will play with my Android Chrome tonight. STW logs me out, but then so does every other forum. But Facebook doesn’t, even when migrating between wifi and data.
Not noticed STW asking for location, but have certainly noticed a few other places asking recently. I just hit the get lost button.