Not to knock a site I don't really participate in, but
these forums are significantly more work for me to read quickly than the ones here. The layout is simple and more than effective. No obnoxious avatars to take up space, create visual noise, or slow down page loading. No gigantic "user info" box before each and every post, limiting the amount of space the actual content takes up. There's a tremendous amount of empty space on that page, it's just wasteful. The additional information that's listed for those users would more than fit under their usernames using the existing layout.
I like the simplicity of this site. There's one ad at the top and one at the bottom and links to sponsors on the left.
The color scheme is simple and easy to read. Fonts are well-behaved and appropriately sized. No pale fonts on a dark background, no teeny text.
I come here for the content, not the visuals. As cool as avatars may be to 18-year-olds on Myspace, they add zero useful content to the site.
That said, I'd like to see a more uniform and standardized format for the For Sale listings. It's a pain to search for "L/LM" and "Legends/Lanemasters" and "lane masters" and "lane mast". Or for "Brunswick", "Big B", "Bruns",... . Unfortunately, I can't think of any really good ways to get around that problem that also scales well to the number of manufacturers and the plethora of balls that each puts out.
One feature that I'd like is whatever bit does the formatting for long URLs to automatically generate properly formed URL tags with some short text instead of a 200-character long URL string. Totally screws with the word wrapping. Maybe it's my Mac, but I don't think so. Basically, if someone puts in a really long URL, say, longer than 50 characters, a {url="..."}text{/url} tag is automatically generated and put in its place.
SH
