I gotta say, the site looks slick as hell.
If you do something similarly minimalist in nature whenever you redesign these forums, I'll be a very happy guy. Edit: Not to say the current design of the forums isn't already quite minimalist in styling, of course.
This was done with my shitty MS Paint skills, but I think a layout like this would be really pleasing on the eyes:
(click to see in full)
Very similar to what we have now, only a bit sleaker and more simplistic like the Gamewise template. I moved the reply icons up a bit to incorporate them into the person's post, and I decreased the distance between the post and avatar frames, as well as removed a lot of the icons that don't really add anything to the post's content. Further changes could be done, like turning the username and the dropdown arrow black, and having them float in the middle of the larger, light grey frame instead of in that darker area (my skills aren't advanced enough to represent that in Paint. =(). You could also get rid of the arrow entirely, and make it so that just hovering over the person's username reveals more information about the user in a little box.
And I'd make it so that the post box is at minimum as long as the avatar box, so the lines align at the bottom for shorter posts, as seen in my example image, but I'd also place a limit on avatar height to make sure some short posts don't end up with a lot of unnecessary empty space within them, and to make sure that that there's no significant empty space between posts. Longer posts can obviously extend beyond the bottom line designated by the avatar frame. And, as you can see, there are no signatures, no icons that don't even have any clear meaning at a quick glance, etc. in my example image. Or mentions of post count or other information that don't have to appear on every post from a user, and that can easily be found by clicking through to their profile.
I quite like the look of this, though I know my tastes may differ from that of many people.
Edit #347:
And this may make me sound pretty dumb, but I remember when we first moved to gamrConnect... 2.0, I think, I would screw up occasionally and click on the quote button ABOVE the post I was intending to quote, because the buttons weren't clearly attached to either post lol.
