I think it looks very nice. A couple questions/suggestions:
I would style the login form fields and buttons. They kind of stand out as different from the rest of the site.
The blogroll on the bottom right, has a horizontal scrollbar, in FF2.0.0.6. It looks sort of messy. I can understand the vertical scrollbar for the long list, but the horizontal one doesn’t look good to me.
Sometimes, long quotes don’t fit in the quote bubble, like there is a long one for Hillary Clinton that does not fit. Maybe you could truncate the long quotations and then link to the full version, or maybe just limit quote text to a certain (shorter) length.
I like it a lot though. Nice job.
Thanks – I was aware of the Clinton quote being to big – I’ll fix that one. The rest should fit.
I’ll look into the styling issues as well. I would really like my forums to thrive, but I’m having trouble getting anyone to post in them. My blog discussion on the other hand is very active. I get tons of comments and some posts have over 100 comments on them.
Perhaps the days of forums are over and blog discussions are the new black? I dunno.
I have found that if you have a topic that people are passionate about, they will post in your forum. Also, posting inflammatory or incendiary topics (to get people posting from both sides of the argument) helps too.
Firstly, though, people need to FIND your forum. How are you getting the word out?
Forums are most certainly not dead. I read lots of blogs, but only post in forums, generally.