TeaForum.org

First of all, I love this forum. I like the community, I like the design and I like the fact that it's very well moderated. The only thing that I find difficult is to find where the most active conversations are. When I visit the home page, I want to know where everyone online is hanging out and join the conversation. My recommendation would be add a list of topics on the homepage with the latest comments.

Just a suggestion!

If you check out the Quick Links menu in the upper left corner you'll see that one of the choices is "Active Topics". That might do what you want.

Personally, I like it the way it is. More subtle, without clogging up everything. Maybe good to keep a distance to fb and the noisier kind of places. Might keep the trolls away...

the 'active topics' page is what i look at the most:
search.php?search_id=active_topics

others prefer 'unread posts'.

even though the heaviest users of the site probably use those a lot more than the forum index (since they're pretty familiar with the board and just want to see the latest conversations), i think that hiding said index is too confusing for noobs and non-members. there's a reason that the table of contents goes in the beginning of books.

as for your suggestion: i think that adding a short list of recent topics to the main page isn't a terrible idea, but i don't think i'll do it because it makes the page look less clean, and functionally it's a poor substitute for the full 'active topics' page view. i'll keep it in mind though.

I really missed the recent posts tab in the beginning coming from the other site, but not anymore, really got used to the unread posts, fitting for a someone who is mostly a lurker

I'm a fan of the "new posts" link. I bookmarked it in my bookmark bar, and click on it when I want to check. Seems to work well.