ok this is my idea. on some forums im on there is a quick sign up and it is located at the top of the page. i think it will get guest's (since there's so many) to sign up and maybe join us in posting. so what do u think ?

Adding a quick sign up to this board would make this place a dead-on taget for Spam bots.

well we could find out. it would get more members, since there is so many guest's, why not give it a shot ?

for any signup system, you need one of those security codes to be typed in. And we don't need that stuff cluttering the pages.

I've seen some IBP sites with a sort of floating box-thing that prompts you to register or login. It always gets in the way, but it's only there for guests.

Those floating box things are so annoying. But quick signup is not a good idea for the reason Agozer gave. Spam bots can easily register then.

From my experience, a quick sign up wont have a noticeable effect.
If someone is interested to join and actually _participate_ in a forum,
the sign up process is not much of a problem.
On the other hand, if you let everyone post without checking their email, you will have a bunch of d*ckheads here soon, bitching and moaning.

There are also a lot of people coming to a site like this to download ROMs and not to communicate. If they dont find any ROMs and forums only, they move to the next site.
Also note there are dozends of emulation forums around, and people usually stick to one or two forums.

If you want to bring more participating people here, you must stand out of the crowd with better content.

Also the forum is quite unreadable due to a lot of stuff added to the user sidebox. To illustrate this, i uploaded a screenshot. Taken at 1024x768 and resized to 800x600 for less traffic, its pretty obvious, that there is 1 sentence on the entire screen. My finger gets dizzy from scrolling all the time. More useability is needed here imho.

Well just my 2 cents.

You can blame the Attack System implementation for the extra space.
GameCop is working on overhauling the site design, but he works slowly. By the time 3.0 gets here, things should look better (at least from the prelimiary templates that I've seen).

GC could make an inlineframe for that, if its possible.
But then there are these big signature images to take care of.
I havent seen any templates, but i hope it will be brighter and more friendly. Maybe the antialiased borders around the smilies next to the reply box will be invisible then *giggles*

Well, the templates are private after all. If you ask me, we should make the current allowed signature size smaller. 500x150 pixels is too big.

i hope he doesnt reset our level's. because i have worked really hard to get to lvl 56