Steve, thanks for the thanks. I'm also going to go off-topic to post some miscellaneous thoughts regarding the future of this forum:

• In order for it to reach a critical mass of active members, as many of the seed group as possible need to get the word out about this forum's existence.
• My choice of forum software was driven by personal preference and I'm more than willing to change it for something else if the consensus of the seed group sees a need. I selected the BeeHive software primarily because it simultaneously displays thread titles in one frame and the actively read thread in another, thus removing the extra navigation step "up" or "down" between the two displays that most other forum software chooses. But it would be best if such a change in software is done sooner rather than later, so any alternates should be mentioned ASAP. Feel free to suggest commercial software.
• In the long run I expect the forum to be operated by forum members other than myself. If, as I naturally hope, the forum gains some critical mass I'll be looking for volunteers to handle moderation and admin tasks. Ideally the forum will need to be set up so it survives the proverbial Mack truck running over any one operator.

Seconded! Thanks, Jim, for doing this.

BTW, Jim, is there a setting that shows me all the posts in a thread even if I've already seen them? In these days of pretty high bandwidth, I'd rather have all the context of a discussion than minimize network traffic.

Never mind, found it, it's the "All discussions" option to the left of the GO! button in the left sidebar.

You are the third person to run into that problem. I need to either write up some supplementary docs or switch the forum to some other software.

Some thoughts:

• Is it easy to make make backups with this forum SW?
• Since this seems to be not a mainstream forum software migrating might become difficult in the future.
• With AI cracking captchas spam protection becomes a nightmare - my website was attacked pretty soon - worry ... 
• (Where do you host it?)
• I've contacted ~30 people (austria) which might be interested checking out this forum.
• ... I might PM you about the last point sometime but not now ...

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• I realized that the search function could be made less stringent. I quickly ran in a 30sec timeout.
• The list on the left is hard to read - lack of spaces makes it difficult to see whether its just a second line or the next topic.
• the quoting button doesn't always work
• (are sticky notes possible?)

Request for forum "folders":

• APM specific basics (Basics)
• far term productive nanosystems (Far Goal)
• far term products (Applications)
• near term path (Path)
• speculative economical and ecological consequences (Impacts)
• off-topic misc (Misc)

Currently the folder "Impacts and Applications" mixes up two of them.

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Due to it's importance I've moved this comment to its own thread:

⚠ request for forum "folders"

I'm finally back from my travels (a long planned tour of Scotland) and somewhat caught back up at work (to the extent that is possible) and I started to look into responding to some of the posts of yours, such as the one above, and have belatedly concluded that my choice of the Beehive forum software was a mistake.

The user documentation is almost non-existent - I have to actually examine the source code or experiment myself to learn how to do things. Sometimes very simple things. I'm not sure, for example, if there is an easy way to quote a message and insert replies after each paragraph that I want to address.

I'm going to start a new thread on the subject of migrating the forum posts to different forum software.

By the way, this web site is currently hosted on https://www.linode.com/.