I have been pretty much otherwise occupied for the past week and a half so that I haven't posted much here in that time. Regardless, I have noted the number of suggestions for changes and improvements to the forum. While not every suggestion is feasible to action, many are at least worth investigating. I'll be holding discussions on this with the moderators over the next while as well as taking further input here.

I am proposing the following general guidelines:
  1. Any proposed change must have a positive net benefit. In other words, the anticipated benefit must outweigh any costs such as added complexity, maintenance requirements etc.
  2. Any structural changes to the forum must be limited to editing existing templates, editiing or adding forums, and setting currently available options in vBulletin. This means no programming changes to the vBulletin code base (no hacking). For example, one suggestion has been to have a pop-up dialog box show up for members that have been registered for less than two weeks. This would require such code changes. Forum hacking is discouraged because there is a great risk of the forum "breaking" with each new release (currently around 6 per year).
  3. There has to be broad membership concurrence with any proposed changes.
Feel free to comment on this approach.