Well, having my initial look at the new SK site, I experienced some flaws as well as a few alarming missing features. I do realize that the site says "v. 4.0 beta", but that's all the more reason to mention these things. Here are my thoughts:

- Edit function: Not having a possibility to edit your comments is absolute lunacy. It is one of the most important basic functions that any website of this kind could have.

- Power to render comments unseen: People are able to vote against comments. Once again, a glaring mistake seem to have been made. Yes, on some torrents sites, which I suspect maybe inspired you, this is very useful, since the important things are to seperate the ones spreading misinformation and providing bad links from the ones telling the truth. Often, no comments are of real value. However, you must realize the impact it will have on a site such as SK Gaming. In a heated debate, the groups of kids who we have see rampant on the forums before, will likely just vote against everyone they disagree with just for the fun of it. Comments are normally posted to be seen, and very few of them to perhaps be delete. The additional colouration and categorization (like + 4 informative) was much more useful. It helped isolating useful comments instead of just pointlessly censoring other comments.

Also, regardless of any abuse, the threshold for not showing comments should be much higher. 5-10 in minus at least.

- Comment layout: It's very distracting that a bit of the comment is blue while the rest is white. This strange division confuses the eye, and if you aren't aware, it will make you think that the part in blue in the synopsis/subject of a longer comment.

- New thread: Well, while posting this, I just realized that the 'tags' field is terribly explained - I have no idea what it's for.

- Lastest matches empty: It would seem that the display of 'latest matches' is based on a time-factor. However, if there are no new matches, there is no reason to remove the old ones.

- Misleading reply-button: The reply-button in the comments is misleading. You can go one level down (aligning the comments to the right) and that is fine. However, when you reply to a comment which is already one level down, you don't actually reply to that comment, but just add a comment on the second level. I realize that adding more levels would screw up the design, so I don't suggest doing that. And some kind of button needs to be there so that you can reply to someone on the same level. However, the logic of it has be be sorted out. I don't really have anything worked out - the only thing I can think of is adding a button that says 'add a comment' at the bottom comment in every seperate discussion in the comments.

Ok, I worked out the tags just as I posted (since it required me to). I think it should have a hint saying "describe your topic" or something.

Also, the amount of charaters allowed for a topic could be 5-10 additional characters, if you ask me.

Let me just test if the forum-code works (if it does, I want to use it when the edit-function comes :P):

[b]List[/b]

[list]

[*] Item 1

[*] Item 2

[/list]

Two more things I just discovered:

- The forum says this topic has two posts. That every topic has a post for the topic start is obvious, so only the amount of replies should be shows. Therefore, with only one reply, it should show that my topic has '1' post.

- Apparantly you can abose the rating system easily. For fun, I just tried bumping up the rating of my own comment by writing javascript:voteThread(833606,'+'); where 833606 is the numer of my comment, which I get from the time or the reply-link.

Doesnt work. Client side you will see the increase, but it doesnt count.

Ah, great. Was a bit worried by it, but I thought that it must be database-based, so others would see the same as me. Guess it's the javascript.

Thanks for the explanation.

is there not already a thread for suggestions for improvments on the site?

yest there is one :)
http://www.sk-gaming.com/forum/1/819916#threadnew

Well, it's not really suggestions for improvements - that is an entirely different street. That is simply an initial overview, and I wouldn't want to blur it by putting it in some mass thread.

I like that it's possible to discuss this angle is a topic for itself, whereas it a mass topic it's really just about mentioning things. My points need feedback from either the creators of the site or from fellow users to feel that I'm way off it my judgement of some of the features.

In the first paragraph, it seems I forgot to mention my most important point: that I am simply pointing out flaws and obvious lacks in this release. It sees that i wrote "that is" instead of "this is" as well. Give me an edit-button, damnit, this is getting embarassing :D

lal, i don't think people are going to laugh at you for using a wrong word here and there, considering most peoples grammar here is awful.

for some kind of reason i see some posts in my guestbook that were made in a FORUM 2 years ago.

well i guess they tried to be as accurate as possible with their youtube immitation

Asjo your grammar and use of English is better than most... :)

I'm not so worried by my grammar, rather my endless typos.

The forum looks absolute horrible right now...