Agreeing with OP and imploring mods to pass up the chain that this awful and buggy forum will DECREASE player engagement compared to the old forum. I've been signed up on my EA account for 8 years and have the badge to prove it, and literally my first topic post here on the new forum had multiple 'Error, failed to post. Please retry' errors and then told me I had exceeded my posting limit (apparently 0?!?!). It was a well thought out and composed 4 paragraph post.
Imagine a player who has never visited the forums before experiencing that - they would rage leave and never return. Please PLEASE use the UI and layout of the old forums as a template to fix these God awful EA forums before your players stop engaging as a community (and that costs you money on spending and player retention) because of whatever the EA overlords did to spawn this abomination of a forum UX.