I don't expect anyone to pay any attention to what we want, but my site designer friend says this is the worst designed site he's ever seen for user functionality. These are some suggestions he made for making it better.

1. Allow search within individual forums.

2. Move the "new post" box to the top of the thread, and allow people to choose the thread order (new or old messages first). Right now, moving to the end of the post in long threads to reply is insane.

3. Enable threading by adding a "reply" function to the top message & all comments, so people can either reply to the original message or to any comment.

4. Enable @username to allow notifications of replies to a particular user

5. Have a "New Post" box at the top of each forum for those who wish to skip the horrendous choosing of forums that comes with using the box at the top of the page. Some of us only post on one or two forums, and don't need to go through that rigamarole.

6. Make the mobile app easier to navigate. Many users are having problems uploading pictures or even posting on mobile devices.

7. Make it simpler to find and use options on the profile. For example, finding how to allow private messages is too hard - should be a the very top, in fact, he suggests making receiving messages the standard, and allowing people to opt out of that feature if they wish.

8. Redesign the user trade list to make it more user friendly, and make it easier to find by putting it on a dropdown accessible by mousing over the user name.

9. Bring back the "related forums" links at the top of the Gardenweb forums.

10. For God's sake, bring some color back into the forums header! This is a decorating and design site. Greyscale is just ugly and not representative of what the site is about.

I will add that if you are only going to use the Gardenweb forums to plaster ads in front of our faces, please sell it to someone who will turn it back into what it was created to be.

If anyone has anything to add, feel free.