At the risk of sounding overly defensive I'd like to make a few points

1. we did experience a drop in traffic with the site rebranding - this was partly caused by SEO (it took a while for search engines to reindex content), but we also noticed a drop in forums traffic overall. On the other hand we noticed a large rise in traffic to the answers section (now over 4000 posts), so some of the traffic that went to forums before was now split into that section (I believe primarily caused by answers being in the menu and not a lower level item such as forums)

2. it's early days for the new menu but we've noticed more forums traffic -and more traffic overall. It seems that forum posts tend to inspire more responses which suggests both that forums are still preferred to some people and that the nature of forums tends to inspire more repeat posts than answers - we're now back up to traffic levels similar to before the rebranding.

This is fantastic news. All that I was hoping for and more!