I was hoping to get some time in working on the new YWS before showing you the forums today, but a lot of stuff came up today (assignments for school, people moving away) and I wasn’t able to do what I wanted to do. However, I do have a preview screenshot for you:

The forums on the new YWS.
First, I cannot stress enough that this is very preliminary. However, it does give you a rough idea of where I plan to be going. Also, quickly note that I’m only showing you the top 2/3 of the page. The bottom portion isn’t shown because it’s a huge mess.
So what you ‘re seeing here is the Community tab. Under the community tab, you see three areas: “Welcome,” “Resources/Contests,” and “Discussion.” This is meant to correspond with the three main areas of the Community area. Will this change? Probably. As currently designed, to get to just the Lounge, you have to click on “Community,” then “Discussion,” then “The Lounge.” This is a tad much, and a new member would have no idea of how to get anywhere. Needless to say, I’m not happy with the navigation system I have here. Yet, I’m also very unhappy with the current navigation system on YWS. I have a couple ideas on how to fix this, but nothing firm yet.
Moving on though, the rest is pretty set. Right under the nav bar, you’ll see tabs for “New,” “Top,” and “Friends.” The “New” tab shows the three latest topics for that section, the “Top” tab shows the three most popular topics over the past week for that section, and the “Friends” tab shows you the three most recent topics created by your friends.
Underneath that is a listing of all the topics for that section. Ten topics will be shown in each column, and you’ll be able to easily scroll through these without ever refreshing the page. For example, right now, you have page “1, 2, 3… 25, 26, 27,” and each time you click one, everything refreshes. This can be annoying. So instead, only the new data will refresh, which saves time. You’ll even be able to type in what page you want to see. By the way, this is also how topics will work as well.
Then you see the sidebar on the right hand side. At the moment, the sidebar is identical to the one on the front page. However, this will change. That is, the user box (with the pencil) will stay as well as the ad, but featured member and recent posts will be replaced with something else. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to replace them with yet. On topic pages, it’ll be replaced with information about the author and their recent literary works. but for forums, I don’t know. So if you have an idea, please help me!
So there you have it! There really isn’t much to say about the forums for now, and what you see here is preliminary. Yet at the very least, it does show you some of the design process. Tomorrow, I’m going to go into more detail on the user info box, and over the next few days, I’m going to be showing you some awesome features that are not available on the current YWS.
And again, if you can think of anything to put in that sidebar, I’d be grateful. The same goes for ideas about the navigation system.