I've made several updates to the forum today. I'm pretty happy to finally be making progress with developing this forum.
The avatars, by default, are circular. I've reduced the radius of the avatars to make them more square with rounded edges.
The default pixel-based values for the forum and widths are biw percentage-based values. This is important as not everyone has the same monitor size, and it's ideal for the viewing experience to be consistent for everyone.
I've removed the "social shares" sidebar widget. I've always just found these to be a tad silly to have on small websites. Besides, there are already share buttons over each post by default, so having a general share widget felt redundant.
I've started adjusting the colour palette. I want to work on the dark theme first. Preferably, I want it to be the only theme as maintaining two themes is too much work. A light theme can be created later on if there's any demand for it from the community. Ithink I'll still with this alexandrite type of colour scheme for now.
I've disabled the "angry" and "haha" reactions. The "sad" reaction might seem a little negative, so I've removed that as well. The corpos are sort of right about "negative" reaction causing issues in communities. On the other forum, just the "haha" reaction is enabled for whatever reason, and it's often used sarcastically. The "like" reaction is +1, the "love" reaction is +2, the "wow" reaction is +1.
Username changes are no longer displayed publicly.
I've limited the number of subforums to just the ones I consider to be essential. There were too many to start.
Usergroups now have badges! These still need to be customised in terms of colour (along with usernames), but at least the badges are there now.
Usergroups now have different coloured usernames. Administrators are white, Moderators are red, VIPs are light blue, Donors are orange, and registered members are green. I made my own special usergroup a gradient, which I'll consider doing to other usergroups in the future.