Hey Aaron, I just noticed this program in your sig and thought I'd try it out.  I really like it!  I think I'll be using it from now on instead of going in through the website.

I understand it's just an early alpha and you've probably got a lot of work to do on it, but here are my first impressions.

I wish there were a way to retrieve all the posts in a forum at once, or at least have it automaticaly refresh every now and then until it's caught up. It's extremely inconvient for large forums that you have not visited before.  For example, the admin community general discussion board has 1592 posts.  I click on it and I get like 50 posts or so from September 2003 to early 2004.  In order to see the recent posts, I need to click the refresh button a whole lotta times.

If you can't simply add a bulk download to get them all at once, could you add an options screen where the user can designate the number of posts to retrieve at once?

Also, I'd really like to see some right click menus in the left pane... Believe it or not I didn't see that Refresh button on the toolbar and I was actualy switching back and forth between forums to refresh them.  I was thinking I should just right click on the forum I'm viewing and a little menu would pop up and I would choose "Refresh" or "Retrieve new posts" or something... I think this is how a lot of computer users out there would expect it to work.

While on the subject of refreshing, how about an auto refresh with new post notification (alert box) like a new mail notification one would recieve in Outlook?  Totally optional of course, maybe a user could enable it on specific forums or groups of forums through a right click interface. 

I would also like to see the number in parenthesis next to the forum name in the tree on the left be the number of unread posts instead of the number of total posts.  You could display total posts on the status bar instead.

I'm not sure if you're going to stick with the basics (News, Forums, and Links), but I really think you should add Shouts... thats where my guilds usually put the stuff I would want to check daily.

Also, in the tree on the left, I'd like to see an item at the very top labeled "Favorites", right click a specific forum and have an option on the popup menu to "Add to Favorites", creating a link a level below "Favorites".  I think that'd be really beneficial for those who check certain boards on multiple guilds daily (like me).

It would also be nice to have a search feature, or at least right click on a post and have the option to "Find all related messages."

Lastly, and this is a big one, Are you familiar with Microsoft Outlook (not express) and the "Group By" option when viewing a mail folder?  I'd love to have something like that so I could group all the posts by the thread instead of having them all broken apart. If you do add that option, you would also need to add a new field (Last Post) so you could sort by the latest post in the thread instead of the thread creation date.

Now for the bugs/non-working things... Most likely you just haven't gotten around to finishing them yet, after all, this is an alpha, but I'll post em anyway:

Save and cancel buttons in group options box do nothing.

Clicking on "Post Title", "Poster", and "Posted" on that little gray bar on top of message view gives the impression that it's going to sort by that (or swap between ascending/descending if already sorted) when clicked on, but nothing happens.

 Edit doesn't seem to work... Can't even open edit window for posts that aren't yours even if you're a forum admin/superadmin.  Even if you do get the edit window, pressing update doesn't actualy update the post.

Edit:  Okay, I just double checked and edit does update the post, but it doesn't show the update in GroupFox, the only way I could see the paragraph above was by logging in through the website and checking it the old fashioned way. This means that if you edit a post in groupfox, then edit it a second time,  you overwrite any additions/changes in the first edit, because your editing the original post...  Hope you understand all that, can't explain it well.

Edit again:  Also, quotes don't seem to display properly...

Edit again:  Signatures blocked by the forum admin are still shown in GroupFox... (For example, Ishtar in the FFXI forum on this site)