1. disable indexing of forum posts in Sphinx - dev
2. we deprecate forum with 2 weeks notice - product. “If anybody wants an exception they have to go on a paid plan”
3. at the end of the deprecation period, we disable forums for all free accounts, whether being used or not - dev
4. we reach out to paying customers that are actively using forum, and suggest obvious 3rd party forum solutions a customer can use instead (but we don’t provide migration tooling for existing posts). Migration path is to use discourse or some other SaaS forum provider. if someone needs a backup, we offer mysql dump file - product
5. we make forum read-only for everybody - dev
6. remove forum - dev

An example of one of the problems that we are solving.
https://3scale.slack.com/archives/C025Y9VUU/p1613391969171900

NOTES (Dec 24, 2021): 

The final decommission date announced to customers is Jan 18, 2022. Ideally, on that day we should:

1. Hide forums functionality for all customers.
2. Ask ops to save a backup of the tables (mysql dumps)

See additional notes in this document