I was actually just thinking of making a thread of my personal recommendations 
nice timing
Imo one of the biggest problems is that there's just too much happening, and it's happening in the wrong order.
I know this sounds stupid, but it's true.
Having all of the "small" windows on the left messes with the brain because of how English is read. Of course, English is read left to right, so whenever we as English speaking humans see something in writing for the first time we tend to process it left to right, top to bottom. I'd be willing to bet money that a native Japanese speaker fore example would find this site a lot less cluttered just on first impressions. Our brains see multiple small boxes with a bunch of text on a new website and go "WOWEE THATS SO MUCH INFORMATION LOOK YOU GOT LATEST POSTS AND SPONSORS AND ADS AND RECENTS AND..." so by the time we even see the forums section our brain has already read a lot of information. So how to fix? Swap the main forum column with the smol bois on the left.
Another thing is the major color contrasts/dark colors. This hurts the eyes in large doses. Check out almost every single large forum and you'll either see a monochrome scheme, or a tri-color base with none of the colors being too dramatically different from one another. The deep blue background on here not only makes the white brighter, but also makes the entire body of the website seem smaller. Think about if you were painting a room. If you do black walls, the room is going to seem absolutely tiny regardless of it's actual size, and that's just an unavoidable side effect of dark colors in large quantities. My recommendation? Change hue of the blue or replace it entirely. A good compromise would be a lighter hue blue gradient into a medium-light gray that surrounds the meat of the website. If you would like to keep blue as a major color, lighten it a lot. Maybe up to something like a #AFD5E6 (hex color). I understand the connection between the background and the rank color and all that jazz, but the deep color really squeezes the center forums not in a good way.
One last thing I'd like to add is that there is too much going on, and not enough of the important things. What do I mean? Largely the small windows to the side of the forum list. I get that you want to update people with the latest activity, but nobody needs to see ALL of the activity. It's just plain too much information. If I were to design it, there would be only three boxes on the side. Recent threads, recent replies, and ads (if necessary). I also think that moving the shoutbox over to the side wouldn't be a bad idea. A vertically oriented chat is much more intuitive to scroll down than a horizontal one like eGO currently has. *side note on the shoutbox. There are wayyyyy too many options and settings open by default. Maybe have an advanced button next to send that hides font and color and all that jazz much like BB code replies to a forum topic. My idea for the side bar is that the sponsors could be at the footer of the forum in a wide format removing them completely from the side. Ads would be placed at the header of the page maybe slightly below the EGO logo also in a wide style. Everything else on the side (poll, discord, featured channel, etc.) gets straight up removed. This keeps the sides of the background free, while maintaining ads and sponsors, and it cleans up the side bar a lot.
Those are my initial thoughts at least. I may add more later but if I do it'll be in another reply. I don't want to write a whole book in one message
nice timingImo one of the biggest problems is that there's just too much happening, and it's happening in the wrong order.
I know this sounds stupid, but it's true.
Having all of the "small" windows on the left messes with the brain because of how English is read. Of course, English is read left to right, so whenever we as English speaking humans see something in writing for the first time we tend to process it left to right, top to bottom. I'd be willing to bet money that a native Japanese speaker fore example would find this site a lot less cluttered just on first impressions. Our brains see multiple small boxes with a bunch of text on a new website and go "WOWEE THATS SO MUCH INFORMATION LOOK YOU GOT LATEST POSTS AND SPONSORS AND ADS AND RECENTS AND..." so by the time we even see the forums section our brain has already read a lot of information. So how to fix? Swap the main forum column with the smol bois on the left.
Another thing is the major color contrasts/dark colors. This hurts the eyes in large doses. Check out almost every single large forum and you'll either see a monochrome scheme, or a tri-color base with none of the colors being too dramatically different from one another. The deep blue background on here not only makes the white brighter, but also makes the entire body of the website seem smaller. Think about if you were painting a room. If you do black walls, the room is going to seem absolutely tiny regardless of it's actual size, and that's just an unavoidable side effect of dark colors in large quantities. My recommendation? Change hue of the blue or replace it entirely. A good compromise would be a lighter hue blue gradient into a medium-light gray that surrounds the meat of the website. If you would like to keep blue as a major color, lighten it a lot. Maybe up to something like a #AFD5E6 (hex color). I understand the connection between the background and the rank color and all that jazz, but the deep color really squeezes the center forums not in a good way.
One last thing I'd like to add is that there is too much going on, and not enough of the important things. What do I mean? Largely the small windows to the side of the forum list. I get that you want to update people with the latest activity, but nobody needs to see ALL of the activity. It's just plain too much information. If I were to design it, there would be only three boxes on the side. Recent threads, recent replies, and ads (if necessary). I also think that moving the shoutbox over to the side wouldn't be a bad idea. A vertically oriented chat is much more intuitive to scroll down than a horizontal one like eGO currently has. *side note on the shoutbox. There are wayyyyy too many options and settings open by default. Maybe have an advanced button next to send that hides font and color and all that jazz much like BB code replies to a forum topic. My idea for the side bar is that the sponsors could be at the footer of the forum in a wide format removing them completely from the side. Ads would be placed at the header of the page maybe slightly below the EGO logo also in a wide style. Everything else on the side (poll, discord, featured channel, etc.) gets straight up removed. This keeps the sides of the background free, while maintaining ads and sponsors, and it cleans up the side bar a lot.
Those are my initial thoughts at least. I may add more later but if I do it'll be in another reply. I don't want to write a whole book in one message
