Your welcome Rex.
The whole idea here is to fulfill one of the promises I made when I took over the forum.

I said that I would do all I can to make the operation of this forum as open, honest and transparent as possible.

This is the reason I am attempting to explain some things about how the forum operates.

I will be following up this over the next few days. I have a new version of the forum being coded and hope to announce its release very soon. I hope that this new version of the forum will upgrade the 'look' of the forum without causing us all having to re-learn how to use it.

This new version will, I hope, accomplish a few other things as well.

The first is to clear out some deadwood in the code. Over the years quite a few modifications have been made to the forum software. Some were an attempt to make the forum easier and more important to search engines like google. We think that with so many add-ons they are causing conflicts and may be behind the current problem of members being logged out so often.

The next modification will be to our Rules and Policies. The current set of Rules were never well thought out. They are a jumble of thoughts that were added and modified as problems arose with members. Sort of along the lines of stomping out fires instead of preventing them in the first place. We hope to have a simple set of basic rules backed up with a set of policies that should take no more than 3 minutes to read and understand.

The next goal is to bring on a new philosophy of how this forum is run. We hope to institute a "Report Based Moderation" style. This means that we will treat our members as adults. Adults have learned a sense of right and wrong. They don't need to be forced to follow rules, they follow them because it is right. We also believe that the best way to police this forum is for our members to police themselves. If you see a post or thread that you find objectionable, or which you think is a violation of our rules, you can, and should, report it to the Forum Moderators for review.

And the last thing I would like to talk about right now is our Advertising Plan. I have been trying to find a way to allow all types of companies that supply Kilts and Kilt related products a way to join this forum as advertisers.

I will talk about each of these things in depth and one at a time in further follow-up posts.