RAFO was created as a Wotmania nostalgia exercise, which is fine for the purposes of ensuring continuity from the old Wotmania board. However, newcomers (and some old hands) will be put off by the website looking like it's still in 1998.
So that discussion goes to the heart of what RAFO is for and what it will be in the future. If it's to be more of a literary review site (and 'Read and Find Out' is a fine title even separated from its WoT origins), it needs some serious and heavy work. If it's to remain a WoTmania fansite, it can stay as it is and probably die of obscurity in a few years time.
Harsh, possibly, but I think also accurate seeing what's happened to many other sites.
It's way too late to do this, but something akin to Tor.com's approach of taking several prominent SF/F bloggers and giving them space for columns and re-read discussion threads would have kept things from decaying too much, so soon. It's something I would have liked for OF years ago, as a matter of fact - there were some proposals, if I recall, for databases of author/book information as well as reviews (suggested before Wikipedia became big, around 10-11 years ago).
But I fear that ship has sailed. I doubt anyone would be asked (after all, those who did provide much of the content for OF were pretty much given the cold shoulder when this site started, to be honest) to contribute to such a thing, but certainly having a splash page-like portal contain links to blog-like reviews and related discussions would be better than the current thing.
Je suis méchant.
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