Let's look at the facts.

has the site undergone any major backend/front end features for years? No… And change isn't always a good thing anyway asI said the site was before its time.

So its not unreasonable to assume that any imminent changes will be much more than fairly basic changes towards things like collapsible threads to clean up threads, and php and ajax are pretty broad terms which could accomplish this and a lot more.

you seem to want it all your way.

You want to tell people you are doing stuff.

But you don't want to say what, so you are providing the speculation, and being critical of the speculation without defining any info which could ever amount to anything but speculation, whereas if you committed to saying what you planned, the speculation would not happen, or you would have a more credible platform to disagree on.

I'm sure you have something in your head, and what I said may well have been wrong, but until you share that, then you should keep talk of even furthering the site to the admin forum as if you talk about it here one can only assume its up for discussion.

"As Demiurge said; It doesn't matter what the development cost is or what you are developing, announcing features before you know for sure they will be implemented is a bad call."

Its only a bad call if you don't plan what you say in relation to what you can deliver. If you say a feature is a possiblity, its the users fault if they are too stupid to distinguish being a "maybe" and a "promise". And its the devs fault if he does not deliver.
If the dev says nothing and delivers anything, the outcome only goes their way.

There is no reason why a feature which is 100% intended and has someone with the skillset to make it happen. Should happen. If it does not, they deserve to be called up on it.

This is not quakecon.org where the admins justify their mediocrity by citing they are working for pizza and coke and are therefore allowed to make mistakes.

People do it ALL THE TIME in business. Sorry, I'm not part of the freebie amateur world of the net where just because someone does something for free its allowed to be marred with uncertainty.

have some balls, be accountable for something instead of hiding behind a one sided mirror where you get praised if you do anything and do not face critique' because you never promised anything.

Don't try and tarnish me with your 2nd rate belief system.

If I volunteer to do work, whether its paid or free, I give a straight answer, I don't hide behind a maybe to ensure if I mess it up, I still come out smelling of roses.

"Which is why we say very little, until we know if it can be delivered or not."

Which is why you should have kept it to the admin forums until you had something concrete to say to begin with.

The only changes most people wanted on the site was...

Better content.
Better behaved admins.
Less trolling.
A better thread structure. (and the last 3 are closely related)

you can have the best looking, fastest loading site in the world, if you do not address the above points, it'll all go to waste.

So why be cryptic over features when the most important one's could be done today, tomorrow, now?

The site has everything else, whether it could be executed slightly better or faster or in html 5 or more securely with rounded edges and a 2011 colour scheme is not relevant, wouldn't it be cool if we had an internal ladder system for tourneys, yeah, but would it really change anything?

Wouldn't it be cool if I could login with my facebook details, hey what about one of those social media boxes so we can submit to reddit and stumblupon!
How about buttons for B/U/i? maybe an attach pic icon so nubs can spam more pics as the .img1 tags is too complex?

Would it gain traffic?
Would lost users come back to the site?

No. There is nothing you can do at a technical level that would make a real difference, the things you can do that would make a difference are all just common sense an dfairly easy to implement.

You would STILL get better results from addressing the points above, of which could be done in a matter of days with some common sense and a few hours work.

Which is why I do not think its big deal to implement what is ACTUALYL NEEDED.

Someone out there with tech skills might well be saying we need this or that, but there are other core things which are needed first which ARE NOT that difficult to implement.