Thanks, Frank. I checked them out a few months ago and thought they had some good ideas, and I see that they've made some improvements since then. Pretty nice setup, all in all.

I'm kind of ambivalent about the way they're trying to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to ads versus users and board operators. I guess it's kind of a slick trick to use ads as an irritant to get people to cough up money to block them, but it has this faint smell of extortion. But then somebody has to pay the bills. The damn Internet economy's not ready for prime time yet!

I'm planning a membership system in the near future, because it has benefits beyond extortion (please excuse the poor choice of words ;-0). One good thing is that it keeps out spammer spiders that automatically harvest email addresses, and these "private NSA" companies that hoover the Net on behalf of corporations; and the membership system can "broker" email if people want to keep their addresses confidential. It allows setting up private or semi-private (registered members) or public boards; more options for moderators.

Polls too are a great idea, and they're up near the top of my list. I've noticed how often threads are really polls, somebody asking a question, people posting a lot of "n/t" votes.

What do you think of this idea: Adapting the polling system to allow people to rate messages or threads in realtime? People give it a thumbs up or down, the system creates some sort of ***1/2 rating icon. Maybe that's also a self-serve way to label a flame war, by consensus.

I think EZBoard's worth studying some more. What's your impression? What sort of stuff would you want me to add to HabitableZone?

--Robert