As suggested in this aspnet forum thread by Michael, i am reposting this for discussion. I have posted this elsewhere, but darned if i could find it. i will also post it in Gemini for further consideration:

...Regarding suggestions for ways to improve the forum experience: something i have mentioned at least once elsewhere: i would like to see a paradigm shift away from just using hard-coded forum/subforum id's within the post to isolate and publish the threads available. I would rather see an option to allow us to assign **categories** to each post. We could select from 1 or many pre-built categories that our post would be associated with. We could then choose from within our forum preferences which type of view we would like to use: forum/subforum presentation, or category presentation. We could even perhaps select our default areas of interest from within the categories to pre-filter the one non-forum-oriented view of the threads. If we only wanted to see skin-related posts, use the ajax-powered selector, re-filter the threads, poof, easy. Grab another category, poof easy, wanna see them all, and only the new ones from today, poof easy, no category filtering, limited to today.

It is a new way to hit the forums, but it would make things a lot easier from my perspective.

Another suggestion: completely rewrite the search tool, remove the hard-to-follow paradigm of finding a forum, offer checkboxes beside any and all forums, do make us go through the type in text for a forum etc.. Look at InstaForum for a better model for searching..

Cheers, just a few thoughts, flame-away as needed Ü drew..