Generally speaking, the fancier and more advanced a system is, or rather... The fancier and more advanced the theme is... The harder it is to customise it.
You can see that particularly with XenForo where the developers historically went over the top with the visual effects and it largely led to most XenForo sites looking or at-least feeling very same-y. Sterile in a way, almost like a service by a tech giant (social networks tend to have tens of thousands of groups which more or less look exactly the same).
Other places might include Discourse, as it's architectured in a very particular way, although I'm not convinced it couldn't be customised, if they really made a big push to make it possible.
NodeBB deliberately makes the default theme as boring as possible, as they see the software as more of a barebones framework for people to build their themes off of than a theme in itself, although this can serve to push people away and too often, people still end up using that theme with minimal customisations, as it doesn't have a very mature ecosystem.
I think a high degree of customisability brings out the best of forums, particularly in contrast to just using a social networks and that's it's useful for people to be able to add their own "personal touch" to it all to make it a little more personable.
You can see that particularly with XenForo where the developers historically went over the top with the visual effects and it largely led to most XenForo sites looking or at-least feeling very same-y. Sterile in a way, almost like a service by a tech giant (social networks tend to have tens of thousands of groups which more or less look exactly the same).
Other places might include Discourse, as it's architectured in a very particular way, although I'm not convinced it couldn't be customised, if they really made a big push to make it possible.
NodeBB deliberately makes the default theme as boring as possible, as they see the software as more of a barebones framework for people to build their themes off of than a theme in itself, although this can serve to push people away and too often, people still end up using that theme with minimal customisations, as it doesn't have a very mature ecosystem.
I think a high degree of customisability brings out the best of forums, particularly in contrast to just using a social networks and that's it's useful for people to be able to add their own "personal touch" to it all to make it a little more personable.
