To answer some questions people have asked:
Timeframe - I am hoping to have the new site up and functioning by the end of this month.
Layout / identicons etc... - I am planning on making things optional so if you do or don't want to see something you will be able to control it. The 'relative dates' checkbox is an early experiment in that to allow you to chose absolute date/times or relative (i.e. '2 minutes ago') which some people find more useful.
Moderators - existing mods are welcome to carry on (which reminds me, I'll need to code the mod tools eh?!) but the long-term goal is to make the site self-moderating ...
What do I mean by self-moderating?
Well, it's always been the case that the community choses who they respect and also has a group opinion on what is and isn't acceptable. My idea is to allow people to rate other people's comments (and by implication, them) but this would not be in an obvious visible way (i.e. it won't say Mr X said Mr Y sucks). The ratings will be used to calculate a rank that will then dictate how much their ratings are taken into account for other people. This is kind of like how Google PageRank works - if you get linked to by a 'good' site then that is worth more than a regular link.
Ultimately, the forum will act on ratings so if enough people rate a post or topic as bad it may be removed automatically and likewise for people - if enough of their posts are rated bad then the number of posts they can make will be reduced.
Obviously, there will be some tuning and safeguards involved in this to make sure that groups of people cannot manipulate and abuse the system but the idea will be to make things largely self-maintaining with just a few people needed to review how the system is operating and tweak it where necessary.
Everyone will be a mod !