On an unrelated note...

[Orrex]

A little over two decades ago I used to participate in an online discussion forum about the making of chainmail, mostly for armor.

It was a small but active community of maybe four or five dozen members.

The forum's format was dirt simple: the first page had the various subject lines, and if you clicked on them you jumped to a separate page for the discussion itself. I was almost like USENET, but not as fancy.

No frills, no custom text formatting, no wacky fonts, no search function, and no groups or categories. A big mish-mash that you had to search manually if you wanted to find a particular discussion. There wasn't even a membership per se; you simply signed off on each message without ever logging into the site as a whole.

Again, this was more than 20 years back.

So tonight my curiosity inspired me to check out a certain Fatally Retrograde discussion forum, and I was amazed to see that it's really no improvement over the raw HTML forum I remember from so long ago. How can they stand it? It hurts the eyes simply to look at it, and that's before you even start reading any of the hideous discussions!

Zany stuff, that's for sure.

[okaawhatever]

1. The Drudge Report is set up pretty much the same way and it has millions of hits per

month. They've kept it like that by design. I think the PTB at Drudge cast it as a serious political website, so serious that they don't use gimicks or fancy designs. It must work, they're still that way.