Last night I fiddled a bit with the forum module and drupal.org's forum module in particular. I started off by reorganizing the forum structure to better address the needs of our growing community and to make sure the forums are well-balanced. Secondary objectives were to make the forums' design as user-friendly as possible and to make drupal.org's forums a better showcase: that is, to illustrate how forum containers can be used to create nested forums and to convince people that Drupal forums can be themed to look more like phpBB or vBulletin forums.

The changes were implemented on a local copy of the drupal.org database but screenshots and additional details can be found at http://buytaert.net/temporary/drupal-forum/. I'd like to proceed and port these changes to drupal.org but would like to solicit some feedback first. I'm looking for concrete suggestions and am interested to know whether the proposed structure fits your needs, be it as a Drupal developer, a Drupal user or as a Drupal prospect. It is my impression that we are slowly moving away from the mailing lists to the forums and the bug tracker, so this should be the start of an interesting exercise.