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Think of a 'group' as a category, groups can have sub-groups, sub-groups can have sub-sub-groups. Theoretically it can go many, many levels deep although I have not yet tested it below a third level.

The group page shows any immediate sub-groups of the current group, and any topics in the current group.

The homepage combines the full groups listing with a list of 'popular' topics. The 'popularity is determined by the number of replies.

I plan on making the layout of the homepage customisable in some way, just haven't worked out exactly what way that is just yet.

Topics are colour-coded based on the 'label' that has been assigned to the topic.

The groups index, nothing too exciting, show all the groups in their hierarchical structure.

Individual topic or discussion page. The sidebar has list of top 5 popular groups (based on topic count) and top 5 popular topics (based on reply count). I'm going to change the topic list to only show topics from the same group as the topic currently being viewed.

The topic 'starter' is highlighted in green throughout the reply stream for visibility, I plan on also highlighting the admin user(s) in a different colour if/when they are not the topic starter. In the sidebar there is an overview of the users participating in the topic, inspired by something similar I saw on another forum recently (might have been github?)

Avatars come via Gravatar, not going to bother dicking around with creating my own avatar upload/create/crop nonsense.

An alphabetical list of all current members.

Admin users would see all members (active and inactive), regular members would only see active members.

By default (I'll probably make it a setting somewhere) a members account is "inactive" when they sign up, it has to be "activated" by an admin before they will be able to login.

I've made this decision because I'm sick of fuckwit spammers signing up and spamming the fuck out of my current support forum. Which also happens to be the reason I started building this thing to begin with.