The old forum is sadly now completely offline, so keeping this topic alive won’t make much sense.
So are you saying that in the end I was wrong asking this in the first post, since we went from a partially accessible old forum to a forum that is not accessible anymore? 
You were absolutely right asking that in the first place, what QNAP should have done is open up all subforums to the public without login, instead they closed the whole thing down.
I don’t understand why running a read only phpbb was not achievable anymore.