Thanks Joseph, that is a good idea about allowing a free 'Pro' trial (which has no ads/links), that is something we might be able to offer. It's interesting to hear from you that trying a forum with the same feature set, with 0 ads, would make a difference in your opinion.
I understand it's a long slow road to establish ourselves in this market as there are many alternatives that do dominate the industry. We hope that by reaching out to forum admins and hearing what they would like in a product, we can get down that road a little faster. We have been using our blog to interview large forum owners, running different forum software, from
VB, to phpBB, to Lefora. They all have offered very useful tips on running active forums, you can check it out at blog.lefora.com (and if anybody here is interested in being interviewed on our blog, please let me know - we love to feature different forums.)