I understand the need for a bit of paranoia in this day and age of companies being shady as fuck, but I donāt think thereās any major concern.
In the case of here specifically, SMF has similar tracking features, so if itās not been a problem for however many years of the old forum, why is it suddenly now, that weāre using a new forum software?
While SMF was great perf-wise, it was not resilient. It went down a lot.
The new forum seems to have a few features that are a bit pointless in my eyes. (why does a forum need achievements?) but iād rather that, than no forum at all.