"shout box / ad hoc ride box" on the main page

Mark mentioned the same thing to me.

There are various ways we could do this:

We could use the forum: we could create a sticky topic under, say, Club Runs and encourage everyone who wants to use the facility to subscribe to the topic (subscribing would result in an e-mail being sent to your e-mail address every time someone posted on the topic) and to save the topic to their bookmarks so you can go directly there.

I could probably add a shoutbox extension (would work a bit like instant messaging) somewhere on the website but will need to think about managing spam and search engines and about where to put it. The site already has a lot of extensions and facilities and I'm cautious about making it too complicated. Also I don't want to make the homepage messier than it already is.

I'll need to play about a bit to see what's possible. It would be helpful if people would comment on what would be useful to them.

These sorts of suggestions are very useful though. Someone wanted the ability to comment on articles and the facility has been used a lot since I added it a couple of weeks ago.