...is that it is too hard to navigate. BUT I PROPOSE A SOLUTION!
We can keep the format largely the same in terms of content delivery, but tweak it a bit. By that I mean making topics more noticeable and the general site more easy to navigate.
My proposition, Francis, is well within your coding capabilities, I would think, and it would not be too difficult to construct. Nor do I think it would eat up too many resources. Essentially, what should happen is that the site should be more graphically focused. Here's what I mean by that.
Imagine that the site was wiped clean. There are no topics, no members... nothing. The site would be represented as a blank field (Which you can choose different skins for the "floor"). Now, let's say someone joins. Say, Nastasia joins the site for the first time. A member profile will be made for her, and she'll have her own message board; pretty much like the current site. There will be a little flag going up on the right hand side of the screen notifying that there are new users; when you click the little notification graphic, Nastasia's name shows up. However, here's the thing: a little graphic will appear on the field. It will probably look like a little smiley face or something by default. Nastasia, however, could edit this; she could make it a little sprite representation of herself, for example. Or she could upload an image or something.
Anyway, when a user clicks on this little Nastasia graphic, her User Message Board pops up, in addition to little buttons that can allow you to navigate to different sections of her profile.
This will happen when every member joins; a default graphic will appear on the previously empty "field," that they will edit and make it their own graphics. When you click on the "Newest Users" thing on the right-hand side, the user list will pop up, and when you click on a name, you will be navigated to the User's graphic on the field.
The same thing will happen when a new message board is created; the creator of the board could edit the image and it will appear on the field. The thing is, though, is that users will be REQUIRED to choose one of five categories for the board when it is created: General, Off-Topic, Gaming, RP, or Groups.
Now that there's two kinds of graphics, when you click on the "Message Boards" thing on the right hand side of the screen, all of the User graphics will go away and all the Message Board graphics will come to the front of the screen; likewise, clicking "Users" will make all the Message Board graphics go away and display all the User graphics. And clicking on an individual User or Message Board in the list will navigate to that graphic (Think of the Mii Channel on the Wii, and how you can organize/manage/search Miis).
As for the message boards, instead of having the "ignore" feature, people already in the message board could, like in an online game match, vote to "kick" a user out of that message board. In the end, this would make things more easily manageable.
so whaddya think
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