To give you a little overview about the progress I decided to regularily post bugfixes and new features to this topic.
Starting with previous changes:
We introduced fancy postit stickers to explain the use of (yet) empty pages and tricky features.
The info panel on right side will display the latest forum topics on relevant group pages.
Your personal Homepage now displays new forum posts since your last visit.
And today:
You won't get notified about news posts and members 4 times any longer. I guess 1 message should be enough. ;)
We changed the groups overview page to show groups ordered by new members in the last week by default.