Having spent a few days on this forum I have a couple of suggestions that would greatly improve this forum. These are features that I have seen commonly on other forums.

1) Have sub-forums on different topics. Sub-forums with topics like: Dealing with relatives, Handling part member families, Dealing with Mormon leadership, Mormon bashing (pick a more politically correct title that means the same thing), Misc, Dealing with loss, etc. Any organization would be better than the everything in the same forum that exists now.

One thing I've experienced is that with the high volume of posts, topics get buried very quickly.

2) Have a way to privately message other members (with controls like opting out of messaging, ignoring certain people, etc.) Just in the few days I've been on here I've seen comments on threads from a few people that I would have been very interested in opening a private dialog with. Where this is a recovery support site this makes even more sense.

3) Add features to add polls & surveys. One nice thing about these is that lurkers are often willing to participate in polls giving a broader input.

4) The 30 post per thread limit seems weird. Maybe you do this on purpose to reduce flame wars?

These are all features commonly found on other online forums and I think they would really improve the experience here.

Note: I have a technical background and have set forums up in the past. If you could use a hand upgrading to a more feature rich forum solution I'd be happy to volunteer my time to help out.

Admin and most posters like the experience on RfM as it currently operates. That's why we're here rather than on the forums you favor.

RfM just finished an upgrade and doesn't accept help from unknown strangers who volunteer.

I love RfM the way it is. I end up reading all sorts of interesting threads that I wouldn't do if there was separation and I mainly stayed in sub-forum topics related to my specific areas of interest. I also love that without sub-forums, get to read a wide variety of opinions on all sorts of things. This wouldn't happen if there were sub-forums people mainly hung out in. I feel like I "know" the community here, rather than knowing the main community with whom I interact.

I like the clean, minimalist look without the clutter you find with other forum software, like php.bb, for instance.

I see no need for changing a thing. It works just fine the way it is.
I like the simplicity of it. There are no unnecessary bells and whistles and those gawd-awful avatars!

It reads like a newspaper or magazine. You pick and choose what you are interested in, comment anywhere on the thread, and move on.

Don't fix what ain't broke! :-)

It's been like this since 1996 (with some nice formatting changes) when I showed up. Don't fix what ain't broke.

Besides, who's gonna pay for all that?

Ron

You have been here a few days. We have been here 15 YEARS. We do not want many forums. Been there, done that. We do not want PMs - everyone that comes here has email. We have reasons for closing threads around the 30mark. We have looked at pretty much every bit of board ware out there. We have worked out what works best for us.