> > gives me a thought...
> > instead of 'post a message', or this automatic reply form at the bottom of each message, you could add a series of hyperlinks instead:

> > 'offer solution'
> > 'comment generally'
> > 'flame it'
also, 'go off topic'

> > and instead of 'post a new message' to start a new thread, you could have:

> > 'ask for help'
> > 'comment generally'
> > 'technical topic'
> > 'off topic'

> > That way no-one can avoid categorising their posts. It seems nicer than a checkbox or some other mechanism. All these hyperlinks would still get you to the normal post screen, except that a flag in the message would have been set..

> that seems a rather elegant solution :-)
> not sure about the 'flame it' one though, do we really want to officially sanction flaming?

of course we do! It will happen anyway, lets have a delightful animated gif flame icon...

you could go further, and have a different colour-scheme, so flames are orangish and helps have a question-mark watermark on the background etc

All ideas for Olaf in XCC Forum v2?

I have ideas for different layouts too.

trouble is, with mysql, you can't have a recursive query, so message threads cause a lot of SELECTs (sorry, should I have marked this as 'Off topic' or 'tecnical' ?)