These are great points, thank you. It reminds me that, yes this is a discussion site, it would be nice to have an informal chat message interface for those times a lively discussion would be more appropriate, to enhance ease of interaction while maintaning the ability to “go deep” with more expansive messages. A hybrid thread-chatroom experience, I only have a vague idea of how this would look and function, it is more of an interface design issue than structural. We already do this in especially live threads. The idea is to keep the banter clustered underneath the content with any message being able to become the next insightful piece of content.
Thanks for the response. I am sure there are things that could be updated and improved. You are the best one to do that. All of the past changes have been for the better.
I still think FR is one of the best ‘formats’ for a discussion forum I have ever used.