I've been working on a re-styled forum theme to fit within my AS theme and noticed that a lot of newer forum layouts that are considered "good design" by the design sites no longer have a lot of the PostInfo information. Usually, forums are part of a larger social networks and tended to be simplified almost down to blog posts but still organized within the typical forum, sub forum structure.

So, I was wondering, with AF 5 coming out next does anyone have some suggestions, ideas, examples for more "modern" forum layouts? (I'll post a screenshot of mine once I'm done).

One thing I really liked was the ability to show latest posts alongside a forum. In other words...I'm looking at the categories within Active Social for example....there are four main categories....but under those is a listing of recently active forums (last post first).

Seemed smart.

Another was the elimination of the reply or rather the merging of reply into "quick reply"....there would be no difference....the quick reply at the bottom becomes somewhat of a complex "comment" feature...with more complex features like attachments, etc exposed as needed.

Whoa...no formatting preserved in this forum?

I agree with your assessment on how forums integrate into a larger social community. I have struggled with what content you would want to direct your community to the forums for and what content should utilize the AS journal.

I am very much looking forward to AF5. Related to this post, there are two items that have been discussed: the Q&A template and the new display summary screen that has been posted a few months ago as a mockup. I believe the Q&A structure is more "modern" and makes it easier to determine which content should go where.