Here is a small technical suggestion that would make a big difference to relocalize.net forum users:

Change the display of comments and replies to forum posts so that they read from top-to-bottom, rather than having the most recent comment appear at the top of the message thread. This small change in forum settings – reverting to the common 'default' sort order – will make a major difference to the usability of the forums.

Since we read from top-to-bottom, absorbing information as we go, making this change will allow users to have more coherent discussions, and I believe will result in better, more constructive dialogue that can be read by new forum readers as full 'narratives' rather than as disjointed fragments. This in turn will lead to greater participation.

This may seem like a strange and esoteric assertion about a small technical point, but it really, really makes a difference to the way humans communicate: We are used to creating meaning out of stories that go:

BEGINNING -> MIDDLE -> END

But the actual order in which the forum 'stories' are displayed is generally:

BEGINNING -> END -> MIDDLE

Changing the forum structure back to the natural reading order will go a long way to supporting better dialogue, and that in turn will bring users back to the forums for more.

There are other minor tweaks that would help as well, but this change is the most significant, and is one that is easy to make without diving deep into the 'Drupal' code that runs the relocalize.net web site.