Overall, I like the cleaner appearance of this new design.

There is one criteria by which the design is failing in my opinion, however. You might call it the "relevancy factor".

When I click on a post, I want to see that post. That is what I clicked on the link for. I don't want to see anything else. So, an important measure is how much of the (vertical) area of the screen is dedicated to the information I wanted to look at (the post), and how much dedicated to stuff I did not want to look at (adverts, titles, logos, padding, etc).

At the moment, on my laptop, when I click on link to look at a post I see precisely nothing of the post itself. I have to scroll up one entire screen to start reading it. You might say the design currently results in a relevancy factor of 0%.

If I look at "new posts" instead, I see perhaps 20% of the vertical screen area dedicated to the display of the lists of posts.

Obviously, this factor depends on browser, operating system, and screen size. I get a different result on my larger desk machine for instance.

On the average vBulletin forum, the relevancy factor might be 60%-75%. Sometimes has high as 90% for really optimized forums. My observation is that 0%-10% is an unusually poor relevancy factor.

Bottom line here, is that the adverts, their title, and their frame, and the forum logo, are getting in the way of me seeing the real information on any given page.

For funding reasons, the advertisements at the top of the page might be necessary, but this should cause the downward pressure on the size of the forum logo to compensate -- it's actually grown to be very large instead. Furthermore, whilst advertisements might be necessary, a large frame+title around them is probably not.

Overall ... good work though ... keep it up!

Mike