| | Regarding policy, I think Solo is pretty good. The policy of keeping new members under moderation is perfectly fine. As far as I've seen, all banning is done in the open. Everyone can see why a person was banned. In a forum of ideas, I think this is absolutely critical. Silent banning like ARI does is, I think, poisonous. Cutting off personal relations from someone while keeping everyone in the dark about why is perfectly justified of course, but cutting off business/intellectual relations is another matter entirely.
The only suggestion I would make is to have an official policy for what is a banable offense (or an offense that will get you back on moderation, which is about the same thing). This is just another way to ensure that banning is done in the open.
Technically, I think Solo is fine, especially given that it's maintained for free. The only thing I'd add at this point would be a client-side method for reading and responding to posts. This would provide a number of benefits. It would take the load off the server, since it would move a lot of the computations to the client, and eliminate a lot of the re-loading that goes on when people come back to pages they've already been to before. It would greatly speed up the individual's browsing to different posts and threads. It would provide a lot of nice features on the client side, such as searching, filtering, optional tree-view, showing you what posts you've already read or responded to, holding drafts for later posting, etc., and at no extra performance cost on the server side.
The client would be an optional component, and would work in tandem with the existing infrastructure. A person could choose to either use the HTML method that's in place now, or use the client, or both.
As I told Joe offline, the Solo client program is something I might be willing to write, for free of course.
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