[Marco van Herwaarden]

Let me make a few points here based on remarks made in this thread:

• The current shape of the site is far from optimal. A lot of members have addressed their concerns over a period of time. Staff have been listening to this but was for many reasons unable to change it on a short notice.
• Like Brad mentioned there have been many people disliking the old 3.5 layout. He tried with both a layout change and by merging some categories to improve this a little with some more "easy" changes. Despite his efforts, this didn't mean it was an improvement for a large part of our members. We are currently looking into some easy changes again to get some improvement on the short term.
• We had and have a lot of plans to improve this site, and it is being worked on. There are many reasons why this isn't progressing as fast as we would all like. A lot of changes in our Staff not only ment that our internal organisation was not totally stable, but it also ment we lost a lot of people who had knowledge of the inner works. We are now first building up the knowledge inside the teams again, so we can deliver the quality we are aiming to reach. But this also cost time.
• Inspecting the current code of the side, made us come to the conclusion that spending a lot of time on improving the current code, is not the most effective approach. We will very likely first rebuild a lot of the current features, removing hard-coded solutions, transfer them to make full use of the posibilities that where introduced with vBulletin 3.5, such as the Plugin system. This might set our improvements back in time, but it will allow us to develop much faster in the future. Also upgrading to a new vBulletin version would be a lot easier.
• Once we have a stable new code-base, we expect that you will start to see new features added faster.
• Since the merge with vBulletin-Templates, the Design categories didn't always get the attention they deserved. Changes will be made to ensure that both the Coding sections and the Design section get equal attention.

In short, changes might start slow and in the beginning maybe mostly cosmetic, but we need the time to prepair a more flexible environment so we can faster react on changing demands.