Forums are back in action

I can't seem to add anything - change my profile, add an article etc. It all seems to be read only and I can't find any way to get past this... I have not been to the site for a while so is it me or is it the site?

Suggestion on forums & avoiding questions being lost due to off-topic replies: I've been musing on the problem of drifting topics. Many forum sites display the original post on the index page, with the latest post shown below it. This allows you to view both the original question and the latest answer. I suspect our digressions, whilst fun and worthwhile in themselves, often result in the original question getting lost and never answered (even though there are people out there who could answer it if they saw it) because it gets obscured by to the long digressing path taken by the later posts. If the site were to show the original post in the summary of each topic, it would both resolve this issue . it would also discourage digression as the user would always be able to see the original post the topic refers to, rather than just the latest off-topic one. I agree the original post would be irrelevant on some topics ('What I did at the weekend', for example) but I can't see that being a big issue. Thoughts?

Hi Matthew. Have you ever considered not showing the initial text of posts on the index pages? It does seem to be a stand-out difference between the forums here and many others, which usually only show thread subjects, and possibly some stats about the thread like most recent updates, number of responses, etc. But they require people to click through the subject to get to the conversation. It might be that in these forums, people are less apt to care about topic drift. I've wondered if the prominence of the conversation over the thread title means that people aren't always thinking heavily about the subject when they click through to respond to something. Also, with all the extra text on index pages, you tend to see fewer threads in the first place, which might mean people just push into whatever threads are at the top even if there are more appropriate ones further down. And then, some of us just go on tangents habitually. :)

Whilst I like option 1, I'm unsure about option 2. If you do this, how do I check easily which forums have now comments on them? Do I have to click into every single one to see if anything new has been added? If so, I probably wouldn't bother doing that very often and would miss a lot. That said, it would cut down on digressions as you'd only look at / see posts on forums you were actively interested in the subject of. I suppose my position is: I like the ability to ramble and digress - we end up in some interesting places by following diverging subjects. But where a specific question has been asked, we don't want it to get lost in the discussion. I feel that option 1 solves this whilst allowing digressions to continue. Option 2 solves the problem, but unless I understand wrongly what is proposed, risks cutting down on the sociable chatter in the process.