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I've always thought that showing who's online on the boardindex was a little... stupid. I don't think anyone really goes down that far to see who's online and if they do, they aren't going to search an unordered list to see who's online. It becomes a waste of space, query, and processing.

What can we do to make it better?

While I was checking out Polymer that @TE said he was using, I saw a cool demo of a friend list. This is what I want (you have to click the link for Polymer). If you've ever used Facebook messaging on Facebook.com, you see a chat area on the right side which can be minimized to the bottom right. I am not talking about having a live chat (yet) but I think this is where online users should go. Use a thumbnail avatar their username. Put a star next to them if they are buddies. When you click on their name, open up either a modal for a PM or a popover which will do exactly what it does on the post page. We can add filtering and sorting. We can put a subtitle under their names for a status.

How does this save any queries or processing? You load all of this through ajax when they click on the "Online Users" button.

This also sets it up for mod authors so they can easily add a messaging app here.

I do like your idea, and think it's pretty interesting, but I guess I'm pretty old school in that I like the who's online list. Whether or not someone knows any of the names of the people when they scroll down to see who's online; if there are a bunch of members that are online, it may help to make newer members feel that it may be an active community- thus maybe wanting them to become more engaged themselves.

In my opinion, when I log onto a site where the list of online members is disabled, it just feels sort of cold and almost as if I'm on the forum all by myself.

Got to agree with both messages, lol

That looks like a rather subjective thing: what I usually do to guess if a board is active or not is a quick look at the dates of the topics, if they all are from ages ago it means the board is dead, otherwise is active.

The idea would actually make who's online more prominent. I would put it on on every page since it's only loaded when you click on it via JS.