It's a while since I asked for suggestions for this forum. There are a couple of things I'd like to change/encourage, and thought I'd canvass opinion.

1) the Calendar. Please feel free to enter Calendar items. Just click on the Calendar link above. It's a bit clunky to use, but I thought it would be useful to see what races are coming up that people have entered / thinking about. Whatever you enter in the Title field appears on the calendar. Stuff written in the text box below is visible when the calendar item is clicked.

Please have a play with it. You can designate items as Private or Public to determine what's visible to everyone, and what's visible to just you.

2) FAQ. I've just discovered that the FAQ (above) is fully customisable. I've long thought that it would be useful to have a Running FAQ that we could all contribute to, and build up over a period of time.

Thinking about it, it might be a better idea to create an FAQ forum that people could directly contribute to. Any thoughts?

3) Chat. Does anyone think it might be useful to have a 'Chat' facility here for occasional use? I could probably find a plug-in to integrate with vBulletin, or alternatively, do people ever use Instant Messaging services like MSN, Yahoo, ICQ etc?

4) Navigation/re-design Do people have complaints about the navigation of the forum or of the website in general?

Anything else?

Andy

I like the 'new' look of the site (since the migration last year) and the forum works pretty well. Chat-wise it might be a good idea - occasionally we get into one-liner dialogue between 2 or 3 members. The alternative would be a chat area on the forum. Not sure how it would work - perhaps just as it does now, but if there's a back n forth dialogue going on it would be better to have that in a seperate area - otherwise 'hi-jacked' diaries (such as SPs recently) get flooded and some of the users' own posts, which are usually of more interest than banter about sheep or worms, can be missed by the occasional member/ visitor. So, it would work a bit like 'Playground' does now.

Of course, for those banter-junkies a new 'chat diary' would mean they could catch up with recent topics, too.

I've used MSN chat. It's OK, so long as you remember to show yourself as 'away' when you're busy working/ not in the mood to chat.

Being the arch-conservative here I'd opt to keep things as they are, but far be it from me to get in the way of change and progress and generally really wild ideas :p

Fair enough, MLCM, I wasn't proposing big changes -- just a few incidental enhancements.

I've changed a setting for the way that pics are displayed, I wasn't quite sure how this would look, but so far, so good. Let me know if this causes problems.

I rather like things the way they are. I find it flows pretty good and no problem seeing who has posted lately. I'm not big on chatting as we can't do that here at work and by the time I get home, I usually don't turn on my computer.

But I also don't want to stand in the way of change if its for the better - although I think it works pretty good the way it is!

Suzie