I work for an IT company that develops web apps and I agree that the FR 'form factor' could stand for a serious redux. However, there's plenty of (very good) web forum applications out there, and inventing one from scratch wouldn't be the best idea. The biggest problem would be the conversion, right?

You are so right about everyone being used to where things are on the site, but at the heart, it's not very navigable at all. Just look at how many times people post articles (or vanities-GASP!) in Breaking News or such.

I would say that the main way most of us consume this web site's material is by LATEST MESSAGE as this displays what people are most talking about.

That said, targeted content delivery is sorely lacking on FR. As you said, we've all just become accustomed to how it's done it previously, and any change that diminishes that is not well-received.

As a side note, I seem to be getting a lot of THESE today:

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /tag/articles:latest/.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

Rumor has it, John Robinson years ago, started out with a slighlty stripper down and modified guest book. Over the years, changes here and there and a few beta's threw in the mix, they have themselves a unique setup here. Many have tried to copy, but most choose the forum hosting formats out there.

There is just something about writing your own code that drives some. Although not very active, I wrote my own code, takin from the likes of FR about 8 years ago... I recently put it back up. It works well for a rookie programmers first attempt!

http://www.trulineint.com/latestposts.asp