| | Lindsay's right that Jeff and I do the technical stuff, although I've been doing most of it lately. I also agree that if it's not broken, we don't want to fix it. And trust me, there's enough broken stuff to worry about. Not to mention new ventures.
A few comments, though, for why I don't intend to do anything anyone suggests.
Right now, we're processor limited, not bandwidth. So dynamic pages, like the front page, need to be kept to a minimal. If we had a ton it would be great to do every page fully dynamic based on permission status, etc. Ain't gonna happen. As it is, our traffic is so huge lately that we're being pressured to move to a dedicated server. Everything else is low priority.
We've had enough crackpots post on the forum when allowed to from the beginning that we're quite happy with the moderator queue mechanism. No plans to change that. It might be a minor nuisance for new members to post, but it's a huge nuisance to allow crackpots such easy access.
As for tree structure of a forum, we considered that when we designed this, but trees are painful aesthetically. To get wide trees on a page, which you need to do to see the connection of new posts with old posts, you need small fonts, bold for unread and normal for read posts, etc. This linear mechanism works pretty well...if you want to go on a tangent, you can always start a new thread. And it keeps a lot more of the pages static. Also, for long back and forth discussions, which you'd expect on an Objectivist forum, the tree needs to go further to the right. Tree formats are optimized for little depth in conversation.
As for putting picture up, the reason it's so difficult is because our webmasters (myself and Jeff) have other things to do than FTP a bunch of pictures. We've got a comfortable margin on bandwidth.
Katdaddy's idea of changing CDs to Music is probably good, but not a pressing matter. It's true that not everyone uses CDs, but since the gallery links to Amazon brings us money to fund the site, I'll leave the obvious bias in place for now. And I think since nobody has tried putting up Windows XP CDs or whatever, it's not terribly difficult to understand.
It's true that we don't have a list of favorite posts. We could probably add something like that. Again, low priority at this point though.
Those are my excuses. Good night!
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