I think Arduino forums are quite usable.
I know a HW forum where they some unknown forum software. They have personalised it heavily, making it difficult to use. I know they wont run to get a new forum SW, but at least I personally would know a better one.
I believe it's Simple Machines Forum.
I remember one of the web team saying it had been customized a lot. I also remember someone saying it's a pretty outdated version of SMF but it may have been updated since then.
pert:
I remember one of the web team saying it had been customized a lot. I also remember someone saying it's a pretty outdated version of SMF but it may have been updated since then.
I believe that because they customized it so much they cannot update to a newer version 
...R
It's indeed quite usable but it's extremely poor compared to other forums. The first forum that I joined long ago was linuxquestions and for programming questions it's far superior; one could e.g. use colours in code blocks to 'highlight' lines. I haven't been there for ages though, so things might have changed.
My most common annoyance about the Arduino Forum software is there is no inline code formatting. I use that Markdown feature all the time on GitHub. It's not really reasonable to use a code block when you just want to put a tiny snippet of code in a sentence but if you don't then you risk it turning into smiley faces or something.
I'd also like multi-level lists.
I also find it super annoying that tables have no borders. I have to hack in text borders on tables and it ends up being way more work than it should be. That might be just how the forum is configured, rather than a hard limitation of SMF/BBcode.
The big asset (or is it a burden?) for any Forum is the database of questions and answers. I don't know to what extent that is capable of being used with a different "front end".
I guess if you were a Forum software developer (such as SMF or PHPBB) you would do your best to lock-in the database with your implementation to stop people from switching. All done under the guise of "delivering a better product" of course.
...R
Taking all the steps to get a picture showing in your post..... annoying
Bringamosa:
Taking all the steps to get a picture showing in your post..... annoying
I completely agree, but let's consolidate that discussion to the dedicated thread you already created:
http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=571627
pert:
My most common annoyance about the Arduino Forum software is there is no inline code formatting. I use that Markdown feature all the time on GitHub. It's not really reasonable to use a code block when you just want to put a tiny snippet of code in a sentence but if you don't then you risk it turning into smiley faces or something.
...
It's undocumented, but [nobbc] will leave the forum translator out of it.
[tt]code goes here[/tt] with smileys turned off also works well.