Forum changes

Hi everybody, Following on from recent concerns, I would like to announce the following changes to the forums. 1) There is a new set of rules in place. You are welcome to provide feedback on these rules. 2) The new "Hide user" feature will remain. This means that you can hide all posts from a particular user. 3) The "Flag post" feature is changing. Currently, it works by assigning penalty points against individual posts. When a post accrues enough points, it disappears. Unfortunately, it is very hard to build a performant environment around this regime. In future, this feature will simply flag the post as requiring moderation. During the transition, some old flagged posts may become visible, but these are still flagged for review. 4) A new role of moderator will be made available to selected members. These members will be able to delete posts or penalise users for breaches of rules. 5) Branching of topics will be enabled, in order to manage topics wandering off-topic in a reasonable manner. These changes will be delivered over the next few weeks. Feedback welcome, but it will take a little time to get everything working well, so please bear with me. Matthew