This is a thread I had a read of at the time it was posted; I've since come back to it to reply

I do take a scroll through the Wednesday stuff from time to time but really, it's pages of space - I use the word space deliberately, explanation follows. Whilst normal forum threads have a dozen or so replies, the Wednesday threads are essentially conversations.  As everyone's replies contain all the stuff down the left like their image, membership type, numer of posts etc, you can only fit a certain amount per page and it takes ages to scroll through.  Essentially I'd say that maybe 7-8% of vertical space is actually the thread itself.  Look at tonight's discussion, currently 13 pages and difficult to read through because of that; if you copy it to Word and cut it down to just the conversation, it's so much easier to read and follow.

My solution?  I think that when threads get beyond a certain size they should perhaps switch to give less space per reply so that you can fit 10-12 per page rather than 3 or 4 by just displaying the basic users' information like the name.  This could be done like in email programs where they compress previous replies or addresses.  Of course I suspect this isn't something that the forum organisers have (easy) power over; I remember a thread ages back saying that there were only a handful of allowed formatting styles. Nonetheless, it's something I do want to bring up - it's predominantly the reason I hate getting involved in the longer conversations

I would like to more members post generally, there are lots of views but not many answers/opinions.

I do find the Wednesday thread like an irrelevant comedy that goes on for too long and find it hard to get into as most of the posts are between a small group of members who communicate with each other.

Just my thoughts 

Yes, Wednesday is an irrelevant comedy:with B&O talk forbidden it could not be more irrelevant!

Some Wednesdays are great fun, sometimes inspiration fails due to insufficient numbers on line or an unresponsive server that kills the conversation. Some people drop in and out during the evening or just join late (in which case it is safer not to bother reading what has gone before!) Most will admit that there's an art in joining late (which I haven't mastered!) When you get half a dozen people focussed on what often work out to be two separate overlapping 'conversations' and a fast scrolling page refresh, your attempt to join the thread can be easly overlooked (and often depends on the skill of Jandyt or Puncher scrolling back to see who's been missed.)

Graham

So, by football, you mean I can't talk about Manchester United, but I can still bemoan how bad the Detroit Lions are.

I suspect that a conversation about Manchester United would either breach the forum rules eventually or otherwise not be interesting to read.  I don't know what order people place: [1] Sport [2] Religeon and [3] B&O in their order of preference, or what the Venn diagram would look like :)

I do suspect that a better forum style for loger 'conversation' style pieces would be a chatroom that perhaps then got archived as a split forum posting for people who missed out to read afterwards.  Yesterday's chat worked out at 316 replies (at the time of this posting) and it's a crazy length of stuff to be continually refreshing through.

On a related note, Google Wave is no more apparently.  Like Betamax, it was a superior format that was just a bit too clever to be popular.