well the latest forum outages where due to disk space problems, beyond that i have no insight into what other bottlenecks are in place.
i'm all for updated forum software as long as it presents an simple interface like this one. i find most php forums overly fussy with large avatars, signatures, etc. on the paul weller forum, the avatars are so large it's hard to differentiate between actual posts, and you only get 15 replies per page. Can you imagine how many pages long the Just Announced thread would get?
Search, Thread view count would be nice. Spell check is now provided if you use Firefox 2.0.
It would be cool to have sort of Content Management System with a Calendar, limited personal blogging and profiles. A place just for DJ setlists. But not a priority....