I had much problems first to find my way here in forum. Without the recent post linking, it is very hard to find here your way first. I always search for some markable color or something else to find the new postings, but what is marked are lots of stickys, sometimes last posted there 2006.

So personally i would prefer lesser stickys, use stickys only to mark very few topics. If u go up to 10 or more stickys, this is insane. Increase stickys more and u can find new postings on second sites. Sticky only very important anouncements.

-> market place 15 stickys, unstick them all and move them to an archiv read only forum. We live b5 now, not b4.  :psyco:

-> clans 15 stickys? And the one and only b5 clan at the moment "Team Fail, open to all!" is lost there. If in clan threats is no activity, they should go down in forumranking. Please let the newest postic to become first there, we dont need 15 old clanpostings. Put them archiv or unstick them so they are sorted by last posting. If they want to reopen their old clans, they can bump it to top again, or if u use a kind of archiv, they can make a new threat and can there link there past (link to archiv)

-> newbies 10 stickys? Is ok, but looks not nice, perhaps u make a main sticky there and link from this sticky to the other important stickys?

-> community chat 13 stickys? Also to much for me and doubles like the record topics.

I know smacky is working and cleaning here atm, so perhaps some of my views can influence him? 

And i miss a mark the whole forum as readed or mark all postings older then x days as readed.

Perhaps u build a system, where player can personally influence the forumview by their own wishes, like new topic today color red, new topics this week color orange, new topics older then a week yellow or such things?

I do agree though that the "forum activity" area on the site that first appears, and the "recent posts" list to the left of the forums, are a bit confusing, and I believe were there before the "unread" option was added, perhaps now that we have this we can make it clearer that these lists are not comprehensive. Perhaps do away with the forum activity altogether, especially since it does not update as quickly as the posts on the forum do to the whole caching thing. Maybe replacing it with the event calendar?.

Also Smacky-you have way more important things to do than clean up the forums, I'll gladly do it (and I won't be upset if you say "hey in my opinion the forums got messy again, get cracking Zrub.")

Well, i get the idea about this, but its really not as it should be.
To redirect away from the main forum page is really against what
people "estimate" to see.

There is also a somewhat complex point when it comes to search engines:

Search engines "knows" that /forums/ is identical to /forums/index.php because
this is a native behaviour of website servers - at last when it comes to php, asp and other website script languages. They always need a "target" file physically and google knows that /forums/ is the virtual URL of /forums/index.php which is the physical one.

Google also knows that /forums/ is the 2nd level of our website and that the main link from the home page is the main pointer to it. To understand that by parsing the html source is an important feature of a search engines and core point of their technology.

So, its not a good idea to point to /unread/ as main forum link.
In fact, to balance this kind of things, we have the "last post" block.
Perhaps its only me, but thats for me the main entrance to the forum...