MUCH better than the previous design, the other one was a waste of space, this one almost encourages me to use the site.
I love the fact that now we have more smilies,
one small request would be to include Tuzki emoticons and a site favicon.
To put the user stats on the left of a post was a really good idea as it saves horizontal space and makes use of the vertical one. However you still waste space when the reply is only 1-3 rows (which happens very often) as the footer becomes enormous 'cause of the User stats, so I'd suggest to replace the text for stats like
Messages:,
Likes Received: and
Faith: with icons, this saves the horizontal space and makes it possible to put more user stats on 1 single row, you can put a tooltip if the mouse hovers the specific icon for 1-2 seconds. Any user that uses facebook or other social networks should be able to correlate the message icon, like icon even a trophy icon and a dove or sun (rays) for faith points, and use the gender symbols as for the faith(belief) there are symbols that represent ones faith in pretty much all religions, I think most of the icons from the old forum represented ones faith accurately.
Below instead of start a conversation you could just say Message or Send Message as the "conversations" happens to take place in the inbox page. Now as far as my English goes a conversation usually means that you get almost instant reply from the other party but the design of this site doesn't really encourages conversations but longer and not-so-frequent messages.
Another improvement would be to let the user choose the font size of the site by putting 2 easy buttons
(A- A+).
The top bar looks like a waste of space to the common user so could you guys move it at the bottom. Most of the links found in the top bar aren't things that a regular user would use, maybe Help but you can integrate that in the NavBar as an Icon since the help Icon is something that every basic user recognises: the all-mighty question-mark.
I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I can edit my profile colours once again, I'm really missing making my profile feel like a reflection of my personality
There is 1 more thing that I'd like to see, that is to automatically resize big pictures used as signature or put a row or height limit on a signature, it's really annoying when a person has a image of 350px height as a signature as their replies easily fills the entire page. Also while we are at the profile part under the Recent Activity tab when I click on the post preview text I would like to be taken to that specific post so please wrap that in a link.
I
really dislike the fact that I can no longer be friends with someone, I can follow them and they can follow me, very convenient and creepy. That is a really big hit when it comes to experiencing the community as something personal, this is not LinkedIn but a site that tries to connects a christian community all around the world.
Basically everything I said can be summed up pretty easily:
-I as user would like to read the contents of a thread with having to scroll as little as possible.
If I have to scroll too much that will have a negative impact on my experience on Christian forums and will reduce my involvement throughout discussions in threads leading to the quantity and quality of my replies being slightly worse.
-I as a user would like to be able to experience some of the community at a personal level and the site should be able to reflect that.
If a website tries to maintain a public approach trough flow and text whereas I want to have a personal experience that will have a negative impact on my engagement with the community.
Thanks for taking your time to read my feedback and I hope most of the above-mentioned annoyances will be solved in the next update, may God bless us all.
P.S.
Someone complained about high contrast, it was pretty standard back in '07ish to use this amount of contrast, #333333 for the text of reply and/or #F7F7F7 as background for replies should easily do the trick. As for the headers once again #333333 would look nice.