>>Congrats on the work you've done. This is still my favorite forum. I love the interface design.
>>
>>I would recommend the following changes:
>>
>>1) Change the member search to the old format: allow the user to search on last name only, first name only, or a combination (like it is now).
>>2) Allow for searching messages with no search string to see all messages from one specific member to another member by userid. There are times I remember a specific user responded to one of my messages but I don't remember exactly when it was and no matter what I type for a search string it doesn't get returned in the results. I only want to see all message from that userid to my userid.
>>3) Add the number of hits on a message (no personal information, just number of hits) so a user who enters a new message can see that his message was viewed even if no one has responded yet. This is especially important for new users (which you want to attact) so they don't think their message has been lost in the hinterland when no one has replied yet.
>>4) Change the quick search from the taskbar to show the search entry criteria page at the top of the search results so the user can adjust the search string or change the forum to be searched when the results are show.
>>5) Add a means to keep marked messages (a watch list) at the top of the forum. This would be useful for people who have entered a message and are waiting for a reply or those who want to track a thread. If they mark the message to be 'watched' it will stay at the top of the forum results until they unmark it for watching. This is a feature that is common to many forums. If that feature exists, it isn't clear how to accomplish it because I don't know how :o)
>
>I will work on all this this week. Thanks for the suggestions
>
>As for the marked messages, what we have is the Agent. If you click on that icon, it will present you at first the marked messages. Is this what you were referring to?

True, it does show marked messages first, but it shows marked messages, not threads in a typical treeview format like the forum. It would be nice to be able to 'pin' marked or watched threads at the top of the forum. The agent feature is not something that is easily seen or known to newcomers and it requires a separate view to see those messages and each message is shown separately in a grid. If you can pin a thread, then you can easily track all responses in that thread if you wish.

My recommendation was poorly typed, sorry about that. I meant threads.