Like on most sites, I only use the front page visible topics. I rarely bother prowling around since, if it's interesting to me, it's probably going to make it into the front page topics list. I'm also not a big fan of the forum navigation here in general though. CRITICISMS AHOY!
The Hot Topics section in the forum tab is largely out of date and worthless.
Search functionality for just finding stuff is a huge pain. I don't know if it's simply too vague, or lacking in options necessary to narrow down a search effectively.
Latest Topics is woefully out of date and worthless, only showing five topics that are actually from the past two weeks.
My Topics seems to insist everything I've ever commented on just about has unread posts, even when most of them don't. It's like when the Buddy expands, it loses the ability to actually decode read from unread.
Forum Index is okay, but at the same time, I don't really prowl that way on any forum. I tend to defer to the list of newest posts, or unread posts since my last visit, which this particular forum doesn't seem to have.
While I'm on a roll, I also think the post editor here is absolutely abysmal. It's like the worst mashup of BBCode and HTML that a person could have concocted which leads to confusing formatting, forced use of the HTML editor, and the worst time embedding videos thought possible. Being honest, I have been on a lot of forums over the past decade, and this one, by far, leading by a large margin, has the worst post editor I have ever used.
I enjoy the site well enough, and I know the forum isn't the focus, but while the charts seem to now be endlessly out of date, the forum and articles are all the site really has for active users to bother with. It seems like they would greatly benefit from a pretty massive overhaul that might actually tempt me to venture beyond the front page for forum browsing.
