Discord is not a replacement, either. I worked up copying all of my guild's forum entries to Discord a few months ago to give our non-PC owning members a way to browse our etiquette and information threads. We have 27 threads that were deemed important enough to place them over on Discord. The guild has been around since the creation of G World and our etiquette/rules are constantly evolving and being updated.
We happen to have 5 major categories which fits nicely with 5 important threads. However most of these include links, text formatting (bold/underlined/lists), hyperlinks, and more than 20 lines. Our "General Guidelines" thread alone takes 11 posts on a PM (or discord) in order to make it flow naturally while losing all the other features of the forum.
Getting back to Discord - that adds a new layer of guild administration which the Guild Message tab was supposed to remove. For every member that joins the guild we have to explain that we use Discord, how to get Discord, where the link to Discord is, that it is an app as well as a website, and how to change their Nickname(for our server) to be like their FoE Handle. About 1/3 of the guild has joined the server so far...so it is not a great solution for all the work we've put into it. Additionally we have to remember to check it every time a member leaves to remove them if they didn't remember to do so themselves. This is not in keeping with the spirit of simplification that the Guild Message area was created for.
The Guild Message area needs these abilities before guild forums should be removed:
1) hyperlinks
2) edit existing posts in important marked threads (for any guild member with Moderator rights).
3) More than 20 lines per post
Since FoE seems to think they have provided a useful replacement solution (you have not) we are just going to go with a third-party solution that is insecure (easily reachable via a link) for 90% of our information and then push the round peg through the square hole for our "sensitive" information of which there are only a few threads which will be left on guild messages.
Lastly, here is the process for updating a message, say for instance "Friends and Foes". Our list takes 3 posts to make the message. Since none of the posts can be edited that means the person updating needs to:
1) Copy and paste the three posts to some where (likely outside the game) to edit.
2) Make the edits.
3) Create a new thread and add the three posts. Lock the thread.
4) Remove the old thread.
5) Mark the new thread 'important'.
Alternatively just the portion that needs to be updated could be copied, edited, and posted to the existing thread, but then how do people reading the thread later know where to find the other two parts and what is updated and what is not?
We understand that not everyone uses the guild forums and it is a system that should be phased out, but why not add more features to the guild messages tab before removing it? The new solution is not even close to a replacement for a decently featured forum and that feedback was provided thoroughly on the beta forums and is being conveniently ignored.