Subject: Design of this forum…
I guess I could simply agree to your two points, that a search field should be available on the results page(s), and that keeping your search in the field would be a nice touch, but I have not bothered to look at some of the potential weaknesses of this forum because when compared to other forums, I absolutely love this one, and LIVE by it almost daily for ideas, hints, etc.
The lack of humongous ads like you see on other forums and the plain clean design makes it very useable for me.
If this thread becomes a suggestion list for design changes, I will take your head start and add a couple of things that I like/dislike (or maybe just think it could be done a bit better):
1.) I like that the username is shown without an image, avatar, or the like. I think those are worthless on other forums, and sometimes people abuse it with very large animated gifs that take away from the ability to see the real content of their posts
2.) I think having the number of posts by a user under their name would give us a hint of the amount of participation historically in the forum. This is not a measure of their intelligence by any means, but can be a hint at what kind of experience they have. Just a hint.
3.) I would like to see on the results page a hotspot that reads, “same search in other forum…” and let you pick another forum. I find myself searching in the Notes 6 and 7 forum, and when I cant find something, I will switch to the Notes 4 and 5 forum and do another exact search. This would save me a couple of clicks, so no big deal really.
4.) In the sort by author view of the forum, it has a single category of the users name. Since there are so many, I think it would be nice if it were broken down a bit more by maybe the first three letters of the users name first, and then by the users name next. It would make finding “Smith” a lot quicker, for example, than having to page down a zillion times.
5.) <maybe a bad idea?> what about a “Remember me” and "automatically log in> kind of cookie, so you dont have to log in every time you want to reply.
And if you notice, there is a “Web site Feedback” over to the right (if reading on a web page instead of the client, not sure what it looks like on the client). That might be a better place for this thread, but who knows how often that is really looked at?
Just my two cents.