It’s simple. The format and the usability work well for most.
As one poster said, if you haven’t figured out the private reply or mail functions, discussing how to add or improve functionality is kind of silly.
Now, on to some of your suggestions, let’s look simply at the base. A mobile platform is long overdue. But, Jim and his family run this board at a great personal expense. It’s a labor of love but is also a drain, and, if it is to be understood properly, I believe a loss center, even with the fund raisers.
If you want to improve things, and you happen to have access to a real computer, get in touch with the admins and find the SOAP/Rest address locations. They were building that out at one point years ago, and it kind of got stalled, but it should be mostly complete, if not finished. If it is complete, then go get a copy of Xamarin and create a multi-platform mobile environment. You’d do a native C# or Javascript call to the API’s and be able to write your own client. It would improve the readership of the platform, have more readers for the fund raisers and maybe end up making it easier for them to make some improvements they’ve long wanted to do. The other advantage is, if you wanted to have bold or other features, improved picture posting, or whatever, you’d have control of your client and how it sent the data to the Rest API’s.
In other words, if you want changes, do something, don’t just bitch when someone provides you a great environment and says “You can use it at will” and has to resort to requesting every quarter that people pay for it, but never demand.
I like your tagline. Wouldn’t surprise me at all, because some days it certainly seems like he’s using arguments first made here into his show. The ease and speed of which a person can navigate the news and comments here can bring a person up to date in very short order. Despite some other poster’s complaints, I’ve been reading and posting here using a hand held device exclusively for almost 4 years now. If other sites were to follow the design Jim and John have established here, I might be more inclined to spend more time on them.