How about an Ignore this Poster button?  That might prevent things like the recent blow-up that caused a number of people to leave the boards.  What would really do the trick is to prevent anyone you choose to ignore from seeing your posts.  I know I was reluctant to post outside of my comfort topics on the old board, simply because of one bad experience.  If you know that someone who doesn't like you can't see your posts, it would be somewhat liberating.

I would like to get rid of the "Welcome to the new LLS Blood Cancer Discussion Boards" widget because it forces me to scroll down a whole page before seeing what I actually want to see (the list of discussions). Could it be made optional?

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. We'll evaluate them and will let you know if we can do any of them.

RE: email notifications - we have made it so new registrants will not receive email notifications on threads that they participate in or create. For exisiting users I'd recommend reading this how-to guide on how to stop email notifications.

We are already looking into some of the other suggestions, but will add the new suggestions to our list. Please be aware that some things may not be possible either because of the system we're using or the current version in operation.

There is not an Ignore Poster feature available. My suggestion would be to use the "Report abuse" link in the right column (or in individual posts) when you feel that someone has posted something inappropriate, offensive or in the wrong place. I created a document on this feature which can give more insight.

I dunno about that.  I used to post a lot on the Motley Fool boards and they had that feature.  Frankly, I never missed anything because I didn't want to know what a couple of yokels had to say.

When I went to the old forum to test the search for a topic, first I tried the top search bar (which is most prominent). Of course that got me to the general search for the web site.

OK, then I went to the search inside the forum, under the forum title. When I seached, I got a list of old posts. But when I selected one of them, I did not get the post, I went back to a screen for a search within the web site.It did not display the discussion I had selected.

I am also going to test this with google. A lot of us found this forum with google, not through the menu selection on the web site. I can't remember what I was searching for when I found it, but it is very important to make it look easy and welcoming. Sick people are not going to persevere if something looks like it will be too tiring.

I googled a very specific search term:

anyone with MLL rearranged b-cell ALL (11q23 translocation)?

And this site didn't come up until page four. I hope that the site will move up the list after it has been around a few months.

When I googled peg-asparaginase the old site came up fourth, which was good. The link to the new site is quite clear.

I don't think the keywords section is useful, or the balloon poll. Really the families of currently sick people may not have the resources, emotional, physical or financial, to be too interested in fund-raising. It changes when they get better, so it's nice to know a bit about it. But this is life and death for us, not balloons.

I see from the post above another example of how people are adapting to the smallish default font size. Now we will have a mishmash of small and huge text. My solution of zooming in means that these people's posts are truly huge. I have to scroll across the posts, so my fix is poor too.