Regarding my post to a locked thread, I posted on that thread because the original thread was deleted so I could either undelete it and thus undo a mods decision, or post somewhere where I knew everyone who posted on it might look.
The idea was to give additional information about some changes which should address some of the concerns.
In an ideal world users would be able to hide forums based on their personal feelings about them, but that could well increase server load and as Fuzzy rightly says the SD forums are not the worlds quickest though things are considerably better than they used to be. Far few errors now.
I do think we should listen to customer feedback on usablity issues encountered with the site and I think it would be most helpful to hear views on that, but obviously we cannot promise to make specific changes as development time and server impact have to be considered.
Perhaps we could retask this thread to thinking about ways to enhance the sites main page to increase the numbers of people who interact with others on the site rather than just download the latest skins?