I've got the forum-jump-on-the-top thing on my to-do list, and will hopefully get the layout working a bit better / tighter over time - as I expect quite a lot of people have found it a bit daunting.
I've also just realised that not everyone will have worked out you can chose a different skin to the default one, so will post an announcement about that in a few minutes - that might help people out a bit.
As well as the new functionality, it has much better SEO and includes the topic title words in the URL so Google picks this up and should send us a lot more new visitors / members ...
Cheers,
Shaun