SwallowSoft message board - view message

Hello all,

Since I have the code in front of me and fresh in my head anyway, I'd like to hear what features people would like to see to make this message board more useful (aside from not going bonkers and deleting messages like before, hehe :) ) Here's the list I have going so far:

- Author's email address field in messages (like BG forum does)
- Allow attached images (like BG forum does)
- Allow attached URLs (like BG forum does)
- Show all messages in a thread with links when viewing a message (like BG forum does)
- Message editing (see below)
- Message preview when composing (does anyone bother with this )
- Turn http://... into a live hyperlink (like the chat does)
- Allow *some* HTML tags for formatting (Italic, Bold, Underline)
- Search function
- Collapsed view (Does ANYONE ever used this Should I bother ), maybe collapsed view sorted by posting date
- Archive of older messages (see below)

Message editing: There's a problem with this, since I either have to let people work on the honor system that they won't edit someone else's message, implement logins/passwords, or allow authentication based on IP address. The IP address authentication has an additional problem, your IP address can change between sessions online, so if you want to go back and edit your message the next day, you might not be able to :/ Suggestions on this would be appreciated; I believe the BG forum uses IP addresses for authentication for editing.

Archive of older messages: As the number of messages on the board gets too high, older threads will move to an "archive" version of the message board (not just messages, but whole threads - so you don't have that annoying truncation happening to the the last thread on the board), where they will be kept for a long time but no new posts in the thread will be allowed. I'm thinking that however many posts the "active" message board keeps, the archive will generally keep ten times as many older messages; i.e., if the active message board keeps track of the last 200 or so messages, the archive holds the 2000 messages posted before that. Considering that in the entire year that this message board was online it only saw about 350 messages, an archive of 2000 would last a LONG time... (And before you complain about not being able to reply to an archived message, think about who's going to check the archived messages to look for new posts... almost nobody.)

Either post your ideas here, or drop me an email with your suggestions. Thanks!

-Digit