Steve,
I decided not to complain about it because I felt it was becoming an Olympic sport (hmm, perhaps not - it's too easy).
I haven't noticed it being any worse in the last week or two.
Originally, I thought that these outages were to apply upgrades and fixes, but as you say I haven't noticed any functionality changes recently. Backups, maybe?
OK, let's try to make this a positive message. Here is a suggestion which should give the 'new message' functionality that many people are missing:-
It has been stated that a facility will be provided to send e-mails of new postings to a topic. This provides new message functionality once you've registered for that thread.
Now you need a way to list all the new threads. I suggest a separate view listing new threads at the top (i.e. sorted by date of the first posting). The easiet way to implement this would be a button somewhere on the list of topics to switch between 'sort by last post' (what we get now) and 'sort by first post'.
If you want 'new message' functionality then you logon regularly, check for new topics, subscribe to the interesting ones, and then let your e-mail client do all the work.
Simple, huh?
As an enhancement to this, it would be great if all the existing messages in a thread could also be e-mailed when you subscribe.
cheers, Martin
