First, I'd like to say that I really appreciate the work that has been done to improve the site and all of the various features that have been added.
At the moment, I find the forums to be the most vexing aspect of the site. We have a guild that has a fairly high traffic level of conversation, and I find that dealing with this is rather tedious.
For example, there's no easy way to mark a single thread as 'read' without actually navigating to that page, which takes several seconds to load. This means that when I have several dozen unread threads, I have to visit each one in order to be able to mark it as read.
There is of course the "Mark all threads as read" option, but it has no selectivity. For example, if I am viewing a subset of the threads (say, viewing private threads only), selecting "mark all threads read" not only marks the threads I am viewing, but *all* threads. So there's no way to use that feature to mark some threads and not others.
Perhaps there should be a checkbox next to each thread, that would allow mass operations - mark as read, add to favorite, etc.
Another thing that would be useful is the ability to have 'anti-favorites' - that is, threads that I really am not interested in seeing. Marking a thread as anti-favorite would cause the thread to always be marked as "read" for me.
So for example, if someone posts a link to some WoW video that I don't care about, even if there's a lot of chit-chat about it, I don't have to continually keep navigating to that thread to clear the "unread" status.
Another thing that I don't like is that in order to read all the threads, I have to continually go back to the main thread index page. It would be much more convenient if there was a "next unread thread" / "previous unread thread" buttons on the thread page itself. (This is especially slow because the various pages are fairly heavy with dynamic content - hitting the back button causes a slight pause while the page reformats itself and finds the previous scroll position.)
Even better would be if the next/prev link could take me directly to the unread postings within the thread, so that I didn't have to manually navigate through a multi-page thread. I don't know if you keep track of which individual postings have been read, but you shouldn't need to, as long as you keep track of the highest read post number for each thread.
The RSS feed is also not particularly useful in its current form. The summary in the feed shows a tiny fragment of the most recent message, so you have to navigate to the actual message to read it - but the navigation link takes you to the first page of the thread, which means that you then have to go and find the posing that the RSS link was referring to. So in other words, its not really a time-saver to use RSS.
OK I hope that's useful for a start
-- Keth
