MacResearch

I'd rather not receive e-mail. I would like a more efficient way to monitor the forums. The "Recent Comments" feature does not present enough information to make a read (don't read) decision. I can't tell what topic or thread has been commented upon. That leaves me to browse the forum hierarchy, scan forum names, scan forum reply dates, all before I can even decide whether there is something worth reading (or not). That's rather time consuming. Perhaps there is something we could do in terms of an alternate HTML or RSS index to recent forum posts? Presenting the new posts with contextual information such as the topic/thread (not just the post title and date) is imperative.

For me one problem is the fact that every reply in a thread can have a new subject. Since everybody has to type something, the subject lines change with each post.
As a consequence you have to click it to see, if your interested.
Sticking to a title in a thread would help a lot. Right now, with the low number of posts it's OK. But think of 50 or more posts per day...

May I suggest a phpBB interface to the forums?

What about an option to get an email when topics are replied to or newly created ?

Saves having to remember to check back to see if anyone has replied.

Like phpBB ,as someone else suggested.

I also agree with locking the thread titles to the initial posts title.

We are going to install a "captcha" mechanism which will require users to type in a series of letters shown on a scrambled image. Hopefully this will be enough to thwart the spam bots.