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While the Answers section of the forum obviously has its purpose, I generally find it to be inching towards redundant for two main reasons. People inevitably have discussions and responses bouncing back and forth from others, which make the answers confusing to follow when they start getting voted up or down. Say in this fictional example, you'll see an answer near the top and it may read something like "What Resident1 said is a good idea. You can do that and also this...", and naturally you'd want to back track to find Resident1's response. But once there are votes, the order of everyone's posts are mixed up and no longer chronological, making it hard to follow the flow of the conversation. This could be improved if the answers that are voted up are duplicated to be visible at the top, and then a separate section containing all the posts made chronologically. Or not even mess with the order. If people really want to find the best voted answers, they can see the number at the side. It's not hard to scroll. Another con to the Answers section is the overlap with other sections. For instance, there's an Avatar subforum in Answers, and there's also Avatar subforum in People. The difference between the two is obvious, but it can make things confusing - like where do I post this? Does it fit more in Answers or in People, especially if a question would generate a discussion, which most of the times they do. There are quite a number of times when I've seen people posting duplicate questions in both, just because they weren't sure. When do you really decide to post in the Answers section instead of elsewhere?

While I'm on the subject of useless and annoying features, how about those up- and down-voting buttons to the left of thread posts? When people use these, it changes the order of the posts in the thread. Many times, though, one post is a reply or an addition to a previous one. By re-ordering the posts in the thread, it makes it difficult to follow the thread's internal developmental logic. I vote for eliminating the Vote buttons. Or at least, use them to only record the number of votes, not to change the order of the posts.

Today, the Answers forums all ask me "Do you really want to mark this forum as read?" when I click "Mark Forum As Read". Why yes...I do. Always. And even if I made a mistake, the posts are all still there, so I can go back and read them. I hope the Forum Moles will remove this overly solicitous feature and save me a lot of mouse clicks.