All the new-fangled features tend to increase load times--usually without any appreciable benefit. You, with the lastest and fastest teen toys, may not see much difference, but a great number of us would.

Furthermore, glitz features invite abuse. For the most part, I'm quite happy reading messages that consist only of text, without gratuitous "personalization" or foofiness that serves primarily to gratify the poster's need for attention--attention which is usually undeserved--not to assist the reader. If the latter were a priority to posters, they might take more care with their spelling, punctuation and capitalization, and avoid the trendy-but-distracting textese abbreviations.


There are only a few features that I would find desirable here:

* Allow one to upload/archive scans of scores. This should be a moderated feature, and messages should contain only links, not embedded images, so message load times remain unaffected and messages remain uncluttered. You usually only need to see an image once (if at all), or on demand.

* Similarly for sound recordings/MIDIs. As others have said, there are other services which support this and which can be linked. But there are folks (like me) who don't care to set up an account on these other venues just to post a sound clip now and then. One can email a MIDI to Joe, but it would be nice to have more automated support, and lots of folks don't know how to properly create ABCs or MIDIs of the tunes they know.

* Allow one to specify the input encoding for message text, so that text posted in foreign languages or from word processed text appears more reliably as intended.

* Have the 1-day message listing actually encompass a full 24-hour period (better still, 27). I nearly always have to switch the default search to 3-day to reliably see the new messages. Really, I'd like a 2-day setting, and for the time period setting to be sticky from session to session. It would also be handy to have a marker indicating the dividing point since your last listing.

* Provide a link in the message header or footer to the message itself, so one can more easily copy the link location of a message one is viewing for cross-linking in a new post. Currently, one can note the sender and date, scroll to the top, and copy the link from the date field of the corresponding entry in the list of messages, but a more direct means would be appreciated. (In fact, I only just figured this out this moment--doh!) One can also copy the "Printer Friendly" link, but it's more useful to others to have the message in the thread context, not in isolation (without even a link back to the thread).