That sounds like a great idea, Laura. I don't know how to set that up, but maybe our Webmaster does.

That would help, but I've posted on almost every single one, so I'd get confused.... :)

[RANT] 

Personally I think it would have beena wise decision to actually design this forum while keeping in mind that people ARE ACTUALLY GOING TO USE IT.

For example: When we create posts, we should have had a way to title it, like this:

Thread Title: []

Name: [] 

Body: [] 

So that we don't have to remember, "oh, yeah, the icecream thread that I love posting on appears as "HI!!!!!I" when you see it in the menu bar.

And furthermore, the threads should be listed in a FIXED ORDER, preferably newest-last, because order changes just complicate the matter further.

The posting system is unwieldy and hard to use. Loading takes a long time even with a speedy Internet connection and short pages.

There is no search function, no list of recent comments, no list of recent threads, to be had anywhere. The forum itself is difficult to find from the homepage and there are several bad bugs running around rampant with no announcements of attempts to stop them.

Posts are so watered down that we can't even post links to harmless, clean sites (such as my site, for example), and yet you allow, even encourage, these people to readily give out their town names? You may have noticed I've never given more than the first letter of my town name. That's a habit from the MuseBlog, which caters to kids my age or even older and yet only allows you to give your state name, or city IF there are over a million people living in your city. This facade of protection is seriously, seriously vexing. I have to think carefully to make sure nothing I say will get zapped, and even then I am not sure if everything I said will make it through.

Moderation takes FOREVER. 'Nuff said.

Bold and Italics are buggy, and I've noticed that the administrators never respond to any questions they get asked unless said questions are in the main post (that is, what gets typed when the thread is originally created). I'll admit I'm spoiled by the GAPA on MuseBlog, who readily join in conversation and work incredibly hard at making the site better and more streamlined, and who really deserve more than a simple GAPA appreciation day once a year, but still, is it too much for me to ask for a little more effort on the part of whoever it is that moderates/monitors this forum?

I've said it before, I'll say it again. We need more variety in our different sections. Six is not enough. For example, Inkwell could be divided up into Novels, Short Stories, Character Help and ER, Title Help, Script Writing, Painting/Drawing, Poetry Writing, and perhaps even an area for RRRs (Round Robin 'Ritings, where one person writes a bit of a story, someone else continues, and we go from there). SIX CATEGORIES IS TOO BROAD. Oh, and a randomness category would be nice.

The smiley function is limited, and the window takes forever to load. A simple system like that used on basically every functional forum/blog/whatever in the world would have been nice. For example, typing :smile: creates the smiling smiley. It would also be nice if smileys didn't include a line break causing the text in front of them to be shifted to a new line.

And if you're going to insist on editing and zapping and snipping and whatnot, is it too much to ask that you at least tell people that you've done it? I mean, if you were to delete a vital sentence in an argument that falls flat without the sentence you deleted, it would be a courtesy to at least put, say, [snipped! -Admin] or something, so people know that something's missing from the post for whatever reason.

I realize that I won't get a lot of this, as certain things would probably require a total overhaul and you don't seem to want to extend that effort. I also realize that you probably will zap a lot of this post. I don't care, it felt good to say it, and you'll have to read it, or most of it, before zapping, so maybe something will be accomplished.

[/RANT]