Thanks for the feedback. On #1 and #2 on the landing page... I agree with both. Those line drawings looked way worse with teeth, so our relative perception is

Thanks for the feedback. On #1 and #2 on the landing page... I agree with both. Those line drawings looked way worse with teeth, so our relative perception is that these are better, but we shall revisit it. On the more critical things with the product... #1. Too much whitespace. This has been a hard fight for us, that single issue, as the vast majority of forums set the font far too small (10px) but information density is high. We've used vBulletin and phpBB as our compare point and we show 8 items per page where the default theme from those would show 10, but ours are far more readable. We think our defaults are fairly good, but want much more active sites so that we can create meaningful A/B tests on the front sizes and white space. It's definitely one of the more frequent pieces of feedback. #2. Started and Replied are extremely critical. Remove them and engagement drops off. Started helps people choose, from the newer items, which ones they want to read and reply to, based on who started it. Replied is extraordinary, remove it and people do not go into the item and make their own reply, they stop engaging with it. People tend to hit the page of items, scan for who made the last reply and when, and then make the decision to go into it. The ones who make the most comments navigate by the engagement of others, not by the topics and subject of the items. We experimented with that, and even the absence of the last author's name on the list of forums continues to generate feedback. We think we can just about get away with that one, but the numbers are strongly against removing them from the item list. #3. Agree wholeheartedly, a number of designs are possible but our defaults today are equivalent to Twitter customisation. We plan 3 levels of theming and customisation and they are all effectively supported already but not yet available for a number of dull reasons. The first: Twitter customisation: Logo, background colour/image, font colour. We support this today. The second: Upload your own CSS (with some security restrictions), or pick from a theme gallery. The third: Fork https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb , put it on Heroku, and fundamentally change all HTML, CSS, UX, everything. Today we only expose #1, and anyone can go do #3 already. #2 is designed for, but we haven't yet built the security bit. We do have some far more attractive examples of forum than the ones I've shared, but they're currently testing their communities and it would not be right for me to make them public before they are ready. We will definitely update the linked examples of forums once some of the really good looking ones go public. Thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely put the vertical height A/B test back on the urgent todo list for when the numbers will make it meaningful.