www.TheLibertarianForum.com All original articles. Tried blending the ads to. Little to no clicks with 700 impressions today.
From what I've read here, forums do not have a good ctr. As for the home page, it looks very "crowded" to me, try a simpler design.
I wouldn't blend the ads but rather make them stand out. Use bold colors so that they attract the attention of users - while it may look ugly you might be surprised with the results. Also, try placing a square ad unit within your articles, with the text wrapping around it. If you're keen on having ads in your forum (though CTR, as ahelpinghand has already said, is very low), there are a bunch of AdSense plugins around for phpBB that allow you to experiment with placement. The best area to have ads in a forum is between the first & second post in a thread. It's a fantastic site and I'm sure you'll do very well with AdSense once you've got placement all figured out. Best of luck!
your placement looks good. i see that you are using joomla for your sites. i also suggest you to use this mambot to make a better placement