A few things you might want to know about this forum (message board) system...

• The board is built using a system called Toast Forums. We chose this system because it was built in such a way that we could easily (well, relatively easily) connect it in with our existing site and present you with one "seamless" experience. Based on our research, it seemed to be the best system in that regard at the time.
• The system is pretty cool, but it does have a few shortcomings. We know. Please enjoy yourself -- we know you will -- but realize that we are working on trying to improve some things.
• The timing of our going live happened to coincide -- badly -- with an expected new release of Toast Forums which promises a bunch of new, cool features. We decided to run the old version for now, to give the new version time to have its bugs (which are inevitable) shaken out. If the new version seems stable and has enough stuff in it that we think we want, we may upgrade to it in the near (or not so near) future. Stay tuned; we'll keep you posted on that subject.
• Yes, there is advertising mixed in among the forum posts. This is very temporary; it will go away once we have paid the license fee for Toast Forums and move off the free, advertising-supported version. That will happen in a matter of days; we just decided not to do it until we were sure this was going to work.
• If you are runing on a Windows-based computer and are using Internet Explorer as your browser, you will be able to access a cool "WYSIWYG" post editor that lets you format things to be all pretty. If you are using anything else, you don't get that option -- and, in fact, you get a rather annoying message that suggests that you upgrade to Internet Explorer to get all those features. We know a lot of people don't like IE.  We know a lot of people are on Macs.  We're sorry about that -- it's the way the system came, and we're working on it. Please don't write to complain about it. We know. And, as I said, we're working on it. In the mean time, web savvy folks who are not using IE on a PC can write their posts using hand-coded HTML and get access to all the fancy features that way. It's not ideal, but it does work.

That's it for now. We'll update this topic if anything changes, or we have more to say...

More updates:

I've worked around the weird time display problem by swiching (for now) to a 24-hour time format (in some places). We'll work on it more in a bit.

We've updated to the latest version of the forum software, but the changes so far have been minimal.  The new version is supposed to come with a message editor that works with more browsers than just Internet Explorer, but that feature doesn't seem to be working yet.  We're working on it...