> From: Bill D
>
> The forum was written BY the owner & his staff when he had a business in 1995-1998 or so. That is why I, having been a member since Oct., 1996, know who is being insulted!
>
> It was written in Cold Fusion. There were some plans to do otherwise, but I don't 'think' it ever worked out.

Then I am unrepentant - the basic errors made speak for themselves.

> From: JohnInKansas
>
> If the site comes up with white text on white background it's likely because a persons browser has been set to white on color, or for some other default when a site color scheme isn't specified.

No it isn't anything at all to do with the browser. It's because I have my Windows desktop colours set to have white text on a black background, because I commonly work in a darkened room, and that combination is less glaring and tiring on the eyes. If you had bothered to read the demo page I linked earlier, you'd know that.

Mudcat's colour schemes are broken because they are only setting the paper color to white, which means that the ink colour defaults to that of the user's desktop, which in my case being also white, the result is unreadable. Approved practice, which I have actually seen somewhere in an official HTML or CSS document, but couldn't re-find it last time I looked, is to set either both 'pen' (color:#RRGGBB) and 'paper' (background-color:#RRGGBB), or neither, precisely because of this sort of reason.

More generally, a web-designer cannot possibly know in advance what sort of device - desktop/laptop/mobile/TV, monochrome/color, screen-size, printer, etc - the content will be displayed on, or who - disabled, colour blind, partially sighted, or totally blind using a screen reader which might be a seperate physical device trying to read directly off the actual screen display, or a driver trying intercept video output, or a piece of software intercepting the HTML and parsing it - will be reading it, therefore it is fundamentally flawed to make assumptions about either. Thus there is a strong case to be made for not setting *any* colours at all. Why should anyone presume to dictate what colours I or anyone else uses to view a site?

However, practically speaking, browser software writers also make mistakes, and current versions of Opera in particular display a completely unstyled page as black-on-black on my PC. Thus on my own site I grasp the nettle, and set both colours rather than neither.

> The link that was "changed" when a "perfectly legal URL" was posted is rather questionable, since it appears that what was pasted was "support.microsoft.com/kb/314463"

No, what was pasted was "http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463"

> That IS and SHOULD BE expected site behavior, so far as I'm concerned, although I haven't seen much comment from those it's intended to help.

Your starting point is erroneous, so your conclusion is invalid.

> The reason for not permitting people to edit their own posts has been explained.

I can see the reasoning why a guest such as myself cannot edit even my own posts, but it is perfectly possible to track which members have made which posts and allow some sort of editing of them. If you find someone is consistently lying about what they've posted, you just turf them off.

> The reason that all thread links don't take you immediately to the last post is that many of us here consider it exceedingly RUDE to post irrelevant comments without reading what has preceded in a thread.

I agree that to do this is rude, or even RUDE, but ...

a)        The briefest of glances through any long thread shows that lots of people still do this anyway, despite the current arrangement, so the current arrangement obviously doesn't make a significant improvement to such behaviour.

b)        Usually one is reading and/or replying to only the most recent one or two posts in a thread, having previously read and/or contributed to it before, and therefore it's inefficient to waste the majority of users' time by not going to them by default.

> And even the most illiterate should know that Ctl-End or Ctl-Home will take you immediately to either end in the event you need to go somewhere else.

But these keystrokes often don't work properly in all browsers, for example in some versions of FF, their behaviour seems inconsistent, sometimes they appear to work, sometimes not.

> I, and most others who've been around her for a while, find the present setup quite satisfactory, and specifically appropriate for the purposes for which the site exists.

Whereas I, and therefore I suspect others, find the forum very unergonomic, inefficient, and exasperating to use.

However, now that we've all had our say, I suggest we concentrate on the OP's problem ...