Muscatine

Threading: we talked a lot in-house about whether to "thread" the discussion area, or simply display them ordered by time.  Benefits of threading: you can see who's replying to what, and if you're only interested in one branch of a topic you can just read that branch and ignore the others.  Disadvantages: to see all new replies you have to jump all over the place, because there are often new replies on several branches.

We ended up ordering by time because the layout was easier to design - conveying the threading visually, so it's easy to see what's going on, is very hard - and ordering by time seems to be more common on other sites.  However, we do store the threading information and I think at some point we're going to add a preference setting so you can view in thread order instead if you like.

Safari: we're Mac users at NL.  We have Windows around to make sure the site works for everybody else but we all live on Macs.  So, we really, really want it to work right in Safari.  Unfortunately, there seems to be some deeply-buried bug in Safari as even after banging on it for a while this morning I can't get it 

Smileys and emoticons are definitely a personal-preference thing.  In theory they convey nonverbal cues like "I'm joking here" (irony is frequently lost on the average reader) but I think some folks over-use, and others omit them even when they'd be a good idea.  Might be something else that can be a preference setting; you'd see some inline code like :rolleyes: instead of the actual image.

The idea behind the "discussion bubble" was to convey a feeling of a friendly conversation rather than the dry, rigid, impersonal, computer-y feeling of most bulletin boards.  We're working on alternative looks and I'll definitely pass the "childish" comment on to our design guy... if you read it that way I'm sure others have as well!

I've emailed you; feel free to email me back and discuss specifics.  However, I'm also responding here because (a) we think a "photo gallery" where people can post photos of cool local stuff is really important and we're working on that right now.  The bridge sounds like exactly the sort of thing we'd like to see here.

And (b), in the meantime I know you're not the only one who would like to put photos in discussion posts.  Nedl tried above but it's not showing up for anyone but him because the photo is in his email account and he's the only one with access to that account.

I'm going to try putting a photo of my 1954 Chrysler Imperial in this post, and will then followup with some instructions once I've confirmed it works ...