Hey Ford - all good points. Take a look at us:

www.marriageadvocates.com

We are judicious in our use of islands. The Who's online is a must. Something approaching 40% of our members use it to see what their friends are reading or posting to. The mods use it all the time to pick up on invisible members who are lurking and where they are lurking. We have other islands that are in constant use.

We use shout box for mods and admins as instant alerts to problems. And given the subject matter covered in our forum, we have problems. Some of the best content is not exposed until you join and have 25 posts.

The deal with islands expanding in size because of something that appears in them is not confined to islands like shout box for example. It also happens in regular posts. If I type a long string, UBB may have the capability of parsing it, but we haven't really done a real search for where to turn it on.

We probably should.

One of our issues is our growth. It has been hectic. Even in the down time, we are averaging well over 600 posts a day open forum and PM count. Alexa first noticed us last October and a month or so ago, we transitioned to below 100K worldwide on a three month average.

Larry