Hi chowhound,
Yes, I agree with you that an elaborate FAQ is not always well received.
Yes, I was having you look at the explanatory announcement ("you are not logged in. You may register(link) , login(link) , or click on a board below to participate without registering").
But I'm a little puzzled at your comments, because that's precisely the kind of hand-holding I thought you were saying you would like to provide. FYI, all the text that appears in various points is all in one file... so you can simply edit the text and to make it very simple for your users to particpate.
If you combine this with super-self-explanatory buttons (eg Tiertown that Eileen mentioned), I think you'd be 99% of the way there.
The one thing where I think W3T might stand a little bit of improvement on would be a "You are here" kind of marker which would show a user where they are. I'm not sure how to do it right. UltimateBB takes a shot at it with their little folder trees, but I don't particularly like that method.
Do you have anything particular in mind? I think that you'll find that by tweaking things here and there, you can accomplish a lot more.
A final point... not to mention the database back-end story again, but from a user interface perspective, many of the super-easy discussion boards you might have seen are also frequently limited to a single board... by using only a single category and a single board, you might find that a lot of the issues you may have in mind simply disappear.
Cheers,
Stephan
