The forums will probably get a change-up soon.

But in the meantime, I will comment on a few things.

User and topic ratings, are bad. Every implementation of such a feature has and will always be, bad.
If you've ever been to the League of Legends forums before, they have post ratings, which are equally stupid.
Reading something you don't like isn't mandatory and all they need is a report post button for mods to take care of it, if it is offensive.

Signatures are stupid, I hate seeing them everywhere.
If they include them, they should also include the option for me to completely hide them from entering my peripheral vision.
Also, those rules there sound like they were made for a game you can play on a dial-up connection.
If they do end up including them, you can be sure they will be quite a bit more generous with their size allowances.

And I would prefer to just see the Guild Recruitment forum stay the way it is. Guild pages where players discern for themselves what guild to join.
Looking for Guild forums are just spamfests, utilised by viral guilds in order to gain some kind of advantage out of large userbases/new players.

The PM feature would be nice though.