The biggest issue imho is the user setting controls.

Say you want to change your hubski theme or change other,more critical settings (alerts, etc). How does a new user do that?

Logged in and looking at your main feed, it is not immediately apparent. There is no obvious user settings link or drop down. You actually get to the page that will take you there by clicking your name. While clicking a user's name to get more info is fairly common in forum settings, it's not all that universal even there and less common that it takes you to users settings, if it does, there is still usually an independent way to navigate there.

Once you've clicked your name, you're presented with the settings page (but not really, since you still have to go to a new page to change settings). This is confusing because it has two columns but three functions. The right column presents post and share info. The left column actually is a mishmash of more post and share info, other info, and your user settings link. But you'd have no way of knowing this because:

The UI elements and signals are contradictory. Looking at 'posts', you see that it is followed by the number of posts, which is underlined. This is a hyperlink. Yet the word 'stats' above it is underlined and is not clickable as a hyperlink. Right above, 'followed tags' and 'badges earned' have their displayed output both not underlined and underlined respectively, yet both are clickable. So you've got text that is underlined showing up in some stat output and not others, as well as in column titles but also sometimes in stat output, but not all the time. Color isn't a good indicator of what is clickable either, since grey text seems to be, bot only sometimes, and other colors on the page are also clickable. All this conspires to deny the user basic UI cues which tell them how to navigate, which leads to seeing:

'my control panel' at the top looking like a title, and not a path to another menu. This menu is also in a column with non-control panel features like more aggregate post information, further confusing the user. I noticed that hovering over 'my control panel' and other hyperlinks underlines them, but this isn't helpful in light of that convention being broken by 'ecib's recent posts' just to the right, which tells me that underlined text isn't clickable all the time.

Sum up:

1- No way to get to your settings from your main page/ No 'control panel or settings' type info on main page. 2- The link that actually does take you to the link that takes you to your settings does not adequately visually or verbally signal to the user that it will do this. 4- Once on the page that has the link that will take you to your settings, the link looks like a title and the UI elements of the page contradict and conspire to make it non-obvious that the link to the settings page isn't just a title, or that it actually takes you there.

A user's control panel settings need to be in their own space, not in a column with other info. What is less clear is where your saved posts, mail, and 'my comments' go. I could see having 'mail' being in the same column as your control panel and saved posts, but I could also see 'my comments' grouped in with 'mail' and 'my comments'....but not 'control panel'.

If I had to pick, I'd probably do an area with 'control panel' (maybe using the words settings instead somehow), my mail, my comments, saved posts, and 'about' which would be renamed to something like 'more stats for ecib'. 'more stats' would contain all that info you have under both 'about' and 'stats' right now. The other area would be for my recent posts and shares, but they would be separated or more clearly differentiated than they are now, but preferably some sort of spacial separation would be there.

Mostly though, I think the UI flow to user settings needs thoughtful tweaking and all of the contradictory and unhelpful little UI cues need to be thoughtfully changed/removed/applied consistently/etc since these actually add up to do the most damage to user navigation.

Sadly, I had a ton of annotated screen shots about all of this that I put together right at the time we had the huge spike in traffic. You were whipping out updates and redesigns so quickly I just figured that you'd already had something in mind for this, and I trashed them in a bout of 'cleaning up my desktop.' :| Should have just sent them along.

Edit: This does not have to do with the settings page, but the main feed page overall. The number of followers I have is displayed as a clickable link right there at the top along with all of my VIP navigation elements. This is kind of vainglorious and useless imho. That is a stat, and one I almost never click on. What I do want to click on all the time is a link to my comments so I can jump back in to conversations I have had recently, annotate/update/edit recent comments etc. This would be a far more functional and insanely more helpful use of that space. It just strikes me as odd that that should be up there at all. Just a stat.