Maybe nobody will like this, but what about expanding the bbs to feature a chat area?

I live, intelligent debate about 'stuff' could be good. Or maybe the forum is good for that too. I don't know, its just a thought!

There are usually a few people on IRC. #empeg on irc.theforrest.org

excellent idea.

I thought this also for a while, and now that you have brought it up I have given it serious thought. While I initially liked the idea, here are some of the problems I see with it:

1. Some people only get on sporadically, or for brief periods. They would miss a lot that they don't miss right now.
   
2. We are all spread out across pretty different time zones. Certain people would never get the chance to talk with each other.
   
3. No searchable, lasting record of information.
   
4. Perhaps the most important of all:
   

   intelligent debate about 'stuff'

   
   Yes, by all means, just please not live. You see, what I just did (quote you), and what I am doing now (writing an essay in response to you) would be impossible in live chat. And it seems to me that it is these two elements that help keep the debates on here as "intelligent" as they are. Just think back to our recent discussions on politics, firearms, and morality, and imagine if they had been conducted in live chat with 10 people talking at once, one sentence at a time.
   
   You see, right now you get to hear the whole of my idea before you respond. You can't interrupt me (though you can ignore me.) In chat there is nothing to regulate this. While I am typing all of this the conversation would go off in a million different directions making this post irrelevant.
   
5. Which brings me to my last point: Because you can reply to a specific person on these forums a particular post can revisit old topics as needed, in a chat room you have to follow the flow of the room, people tend to dislike people saying "yes, but can we get back to the part I want to discuss?"
   

I don't know, this forum has proved itself very different from others in showing a high level of intelligence and maturity amongst its members that makes for lots of good post and very little garbage. It is conceivable that some kind of similar dramatic change would take place in a chat room, but I just don't see it happening. The method of communication does not seem, to me, to encourage "intelligent debate" because it neccitates being as quick and brief as possible in your reply.
lead 2 lang look like this w/no/incorrect punct

Anyway, I have a few more thoughts but thats the bulk of it. Let's have a hear at what everyone else thinks.

Any way we can get that "list" feature to use a blank line or two between each numbered line? It won't even let me manualy put a blank line at the end of each one. That looks horrible.

"list" feature to use a blank line or two between each numbered line?

It'd take some tweaking of the CSS stylesheets, I guess -- the list is implemented as HTML <ol> and <li> tags, so there's not a lot that you can do in the original BBS markup.

Yes, having thought about it again, (and having read your points) it seems a bad idea! I do like the bbs as it is - I've yet to find another one with so much variety and knowledge with evil senses of humour from [censored]