Hi Dani, a couple of quick comments.

1) the light grey text... could it be darkened up? Not enough contrast with the white background. I would prefer basic black.

2) the reply box is too far away from the thread. In a technical reply, there is often a lot of back-and-forth referencing between the reply and the previous post. The "similar threads" is an interloper and needs to be moved downstream. I also like a previous poster's suggestion of making the ad a banner (he said "leaderboard", banner is my suggestion) instead of a big box.

3) the line-height could be tightened-up in the signatures.

I'm not technically "back" yet, just dropping in quickly.

Line spacing in signatures tightened up.

I will take your grey font into consideration. I don't want to go black, but I'll think about a darker shade of grey ... it is #555555 right now which is pretty dark actually ... I think it might just look lighter because you're not used to it yet.

I don't plan on changing the ad box because it has worked out quite well this way, and in this position, for the past year, and it is our best performing ad size ... so I don't want to screw with it. Additionally, if everyone thought it was just "eww" then no one would click on it ... but it has a very high CTR, which is awesome for something farther down on the page ... so again, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I do understand your concern about the quick reply being further away from the blogs as a result of the similar threads feature. However, there are a few advantages to this as well. The first is that the similar threads feature, which is VERY handy, can now start to be used, as it was completely ignored farther down on the page. After all, once a thread has been viewed and replied to, who needs it? The goal is to interrupt that sequence and instead make it: (1) View question in thread (2) See if similar thread has more information I need (3) If not, then post reply ... Additionally, it will help to eliminate duplicate questions asked, because if someone's question wasn't answered in the thread, instead of replying, they might find the answer in a similar thread ... for that reason, I think it works good right above the Quick Reply box. The third reason is because right now, the Quick Reply box is right near the bottom of the page. With similar threads below it, it would be semi-middle/bottom of the page. Wondering why this is an advantage? With quick reply at the bottom, you can easily hit the End key on your keyboard to go right to the bottom where quick reply is. With quick reply somewhere in the middle of the page, you have to always scroll through a page to find it. Additionally, as always, you can hit the "Quick Reply" link in any postbit of the thread to instantly jump to the quick reply box.

Now ... the similar threads feature occupies about the size of one post. If you have to constantly scroll back up and down in a thread, I don't think something occupying the space of one post is the biggest hindrance ... unless it's ALWAYS the last post you need to refer back to, you have to scroll up through multiple threads anyways. If this is a concern for you, I suggest that you might find Threaded or Hybrid Thread Mode much more to your liking.

Just wanted to say that the new design is very neat, great colors... I like it very, very much. Great improvement.

I love the Postbit very unique and one of it kind and most of all i dont feel the vB thing the whole forums

Hum... I dont want to be negative, But i dont like this design at all, the old one was just great !

What's not to like? Apart from the yellow, which would look nice replaced by the silver / grey, I hope nothing gets changed, well, except this quick reply box. Is there any chance that it will get a similar upgrade to this design. It just looks a bit out of place, like Office 97 on an XP PC.

Sorry for the very late reply. The QuickReply box will be upgraded when we move to vBulletin 3.5 in about a month.

I thought you had already upgraded to 3.5 although its quite hard
to tell when it doesn't actually say anywhere :p

Edit: oh, the reply box gives it away.

Edit 2: I forgot to add, although I have never visited here very often, I think this design is great, much better than the old one (although I like that too)

Thanks! But, yeah, we're still 3.0.x here.