Issue One: Centering The original forum had a centered reading area. It was very clean. However, spectrum's forum is off center. The reason for this is because the navigation bar on the left pushes it to the side. The navigation bar can't be hidden, so there's no way to center the forum in spectrum. I'm not sure how to reconcile these. Issue Two: No Preview Button in Spectrum Forum I can't find the preview button. Does clicking publish give me a sub menu? I'm scared to click this because this post isn't ready yet (as of writing this). Issue Three: The Cancel/Publish Button While Submitting a Post Should be Relocated It's not intuitive to have the CANCEL/PUBLISH buttons in the upper right hand corner. Naturally I want to look lower right, not up there. Issue Four: Emoticons on a Posts is a Bad Idea Allowing emoticons on a posts fosters superficial communication. I do not communicate so that people can thumbs up or thumbs down me. If someone wants to reply, then they should put the time in to communicate what they think. This is not Siskel and Ebert (actually this would be worse because they had to communicate their thoughts). Emoticons also fosters a herd mentality, where people start to value a post based on what everything else "thumbed." Issue Five: The Spectrum Home Page Needs More Differentiation in the Headers When I look at the headers I don't intuitively grasp that the Forum and Chat Lobbies buttons are separate functions. Surely the meanings define the functions, but because the type is so similar I'm not sure what experience I'm about to engage in. Simply put the two functions appear to be the same function. CIG obviously wants to have these functions go side by side, but ironically making the interface uniform also makes it unclear what the functions are for. This basic problem permeates spectrum in other places too. Issue Six: The Bookmarks Bar Confuses Me Each line under the bookmarks bar has a general link as well as a functional link that leads to what you actually bookmarked. The general link goes to organizations or RSI, while the functional link will take you to channels or forums. At first this seems like a good idea, but I find it needlessly complex. I don't think the general links are actually that useful. I have access to these from better places in the interface. Also again, the uniformity between functional links is confusing. Maybe putting chat and forums links into two separate categories under the bookmarks would be more appropriate. Or changing the color of the icons, which would break the color scheme however. There is a lot that does work with Spectrum. It's unfair to say that it's bad. It's not bad, but it could use improvement.