I am with Gem on this one. There is almost no contrast between items in this format, and the blue, clickable links are barely distinguishable from the black text on the gray background. Or possibly dark gray text on light gray background. Not sure.

Maybe it is in my head, but it seems like every time this BB and the chat changed, a certain percentage of the users, including those who had been here for quite a while, dropped out. I hope that does not happen this time. I don't mind changing the site on occasion, but the parts of it that I use just keep changing time and again, and we keep having to figure out what is where, where the link we knew where to find went, and so on. This is not facebook, with the average user a tech-savvy 17 year old. The harder it is for obstinate old guys (and I am rapidly becoming one) to USE the site, the less likely they will be to do so.

Just my $0.02