Message Board

The site has an active message board hosted by Quick Topic which also acts as a mailing list.

The site message board is hosted by Quick Topic. It is a simple single threaded system that also acts as a mailing list. Please think about that when submitting messages. If you do subscribe to the board then you will find you can respond to messages via e-mail. Things actually work better if you submit all messages via the board itself as you can then edit them afterwards if necessary and the messages don't get polluted with remnants of the old messages, signatures or totally pointless certifications from anti-virus systems (are you going to skip a virus check just because a message claims it is virus free?). Quick Topic does try to strip some of this stuff out but is rarely totally successful.

Quick Topic Message Board (default display of last eight messages, most recent on top)

The drawback of Quick Topic is that although you can trawl through the old messages it can be a tedious business and so it isn't much use for requests for help that the active readers can't immediately assist with. I did have a much more elaborate bulletin board system installed to allow for this sort of thing but I've removed it because it just wasn't getting used and it had a negative effect on usage of the Quick Topic board.

To help those interested in trawling through the old messages, there follows some links that display messages in batches of two hundred, oldest first, in what Quick Topic call their 'printer friendly' format.

Original Quick Topic Message Board (no longer used)

The site search facility used to search the Quick Topic boards. Unfortunately because the message board is so old they seem to have disabled searching of it by any search robots, and unfortunately that is what the site search engine is. So that is a pain. I had improvised a solution by making local archives of the message board and having the site search index them but that was never really satisfactory and the archives were not being maintained so I have withdrawn that facility. So there is no real way to search the message boards now.