The forums seem pretty bland compared to other sites. Could they be spiced up at all with small character renderings for the avatar at least for the person creating the topic.
Im terrible with names, but faces and avatars I can mostly recall.
+1. The only problem with "I'm terrible with names, but faces and avatars I can mostly recall." is that avatars in Glitch seem prone to frequent change. Despite that, I agree it is always nice to have a face to put with a name.
Also, I'd hope the icons used are bigger than he ones used on the homepage updates, which don't provide much detail at that size. Your example image is perfect, though there is probably an optimum trade off point between icon image size and how long it takes pages to load.
The use of "avatars only" to show which of my friends is online (on my home page) drives me crazy. So many people change their appearance for every test, if not more frequently.
Fusspawn, it's usually considered poor etiquette to bump your own topics.
The devs read all the topics, and make their own evaluation of whether the idea is workable at this stage in the game, or not.
If the idea drifts off the front page, bumping isn't going to make it a better idea. If enough people are excited about the topic, they'll keep it alive. If someone has a similar idea and does a search, your topic will come up. Self-promotion of your own ideas doesn't impress anyone.
'Plain' isn't necessarily bad. Pages that are decorated with jazzy stuff become harder to read, especially for people with smaller screen resolutions. (And using forums on mobile devices... I'll agree that the pages get too long, especially for reading on a tiny phone screen, when a post is popular.)
Avatars are a nice suggestion, and they are pretty useful in many places. But since they do change often .. I'm just not sure if they would provide enough information to make up for the added visual distraction.
Having a switch for avatar/no avatar would be trivial. I don't much care one way or the other, but having options is nice... assuming creating them has little impact on the options I want!
I agree with nekomaki and Audaria for the same reasons. There's less clutter.
And I'd like to note that I like how the names of posters are at the bottom of their post, rather than at the top or side. I like reading a post without necessarily knowing who it is at first :P