I suspect that several National Committee members do read the forum posts, though Garfield (and John Sparshatt ?) are the only ones who have contributed afaik. I hope it does continue, the posts are polite and mostly constructive and I'm sure they cause some thoughtful discussion in committee meetings...

I agree with the points made. I would also like to see a link back to the opening list of topics.

More importantly I do wonder what the purpose of this forum is. I would have expected a moderator to comment or take some note or any action to show someone is listening.

I think the forum ill just die of soon through lack of interest. Which is a pity really

(experimenting) I wonder if it lets you add <b>HTML</b> tags?
<p>It really is poor that it doesn't cope with line breaks.

The way the post above is formatted highlights my point, no line breaks, no links for URLs, all of the post is just run together in one unwieldy paragraph. YUK!

Firstly, the site is a BIG improvement on its predecessor and I've just updated my details and renewed online so a big thumbs up for this.

However, I think the forum feature is really well behind the times in terms of functionality and layout. This current forum version brings the LDWA site into the late 20th century, it's now well into the 21st!

There are lots of either open source (free) or low cost "bolt on" forum (fora?) software available that are really well laid out and offer lots of functionality and excellent search facilities. With minor tweaking to allow merging of login details this shouldn't be a major project.

Take a look at;

FREE:
phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com
Ikonboard: http://www.ikonboard.com/

Commercial (but not silly prices really)
Invision Powerboard http://www.invisionboard.com ($185)
VBulletin http://www.vbulletin.com ($160)

Most are customisable to match the colours & fonts of an existing site using css style sheets.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?