I have created a custom forum module what builds on forum storage but offers totally new user experience. It runs on http://trip.ee/forum Note it is work in progress and I am not happy with neither UI nor functionality at this point. Notable features: - title + snippet form the the teaser: People are not good writing titles, especially descriptive titles, but sometimes they create perfectly sensible 1st sentence of their post. Teaser snippet takes advantage of that. (taking this concept further -- perhaps do not intially require title field, but extract it from the post if not present and allow to finetune it on posting preview). But...you mileage may vary on these smart extraction methods, it really depends of the forum audience. - Forum posts can belong to multiple vocabularies. In trip.ee I use "sihkohad" (destinations), "rubriigid" (categories) and "reisistiilid" (travel styles). I can not imagine how to fit my postings all into one fixed category what standard forum.module offers (actually there IS a way to do it, offering a single freetagging category for forum posts - now that would be really interesting to try out) - Simplified date. Postings only have time value and are grouped by day (groups named "Today's posts", "Yesterday's posts" and then "15. Aug 2005" and downwards). This has scaling issues -- if there is to few posts per day, group headers clutter the view, if there are too many, headers have to continue to other page. A decent rate is shown here: http://trip.ee/forum?page=80 but my forum is growing too popular and UI starts to break lately. I am currently investigating relative time formats (1 week/month/year ago) and will add them soon (possibly replacing current date information or keeping it secondary) - Clicking on term name (2nd column in forum) takes you to a "filtered" forum view where only the postings containing the term are. To reduce clutter, the active term name is grayed out. Example: http://trip.ee/taxonomy/term/504 - hijacking the taxonomy pages. As you can see from the previous links I use standard taxonomy URLs, but I am overloading the default node view with forum view. This allows to preserve concistency when navigating the forum. Compare http://drupal.org/forum/8 and http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/8 - Multiple breadcrumbs: http://trip.ee/node/12604 Again, helping navigating the forums and not letting user to be lost There are more, smaller improvements: - forum title validation. UPCASE, !!!, ??? are grabbed and messaged to submitter. Also there is a blacklist with "hello", "please help", "who knows" and rest of the 1000 common forum titles. If blacklisted title is present, it is kindly asked to provide a more descriptive title. - comment title is optional but it is not shown by default (form_group magic). It is done by because of the different needs of different user groups - newbies do not want to fill comment titles and have "duh"-moment while leaving comments, pro users are used to create titles There is probably more stuff I have forgotten or just exists in my head Now, what about the code? Well...I can not show it to public :-0 It is rough, full of quick hacks, custom solutions and unoptimized so it is not a pretty sight (I deliberately chose to go to "extreme newbie programming path" vs my previous extreme-polish-but-neverending-work approach) -- just to get the results. To improve forums I'm happy to work with someone good on programming side and I can feed him with ideas/mockups as needed. k