"Anonymous" posting has been disabled (I finally figured out how to do it!). The "post as anonymous" check box still appears in some places, but it's non-functional. This means you *must* enter a Username to post a message. No password or registration are required.

Very well!

I guess you can always choose the word "Anonymous" to be your username :-)

Correct !!!

However, that defeats the point of disabling Anonymous in the first place, which was that if multiple "anonymous" people post, it's VERY difficult to respond to specific questions, without a heck of a load of extra typing ("In Response to Anonymous who posted on Wednesday, July 7, 2004 - 10:44am"). Surely you must be able to come up with a username which doesn't identify you, your company, etc. Also, having a username helps people to see that you are a regular poster and therefore may know what you are talking about.

Amen to Tim and let me add this to the Anonymouses of the Forum ............

I sometimes spend a considerable amount of time responsing to well thought out, polite requests for information. While my time is worth nothing as I am mostly retired, there are people regularly responding to questions that are very highly paid senior scientists with other things they could be doing. If you want the benefit of this experience, don't annoy these people.In fact more than don't annoy them, be nice and offer thanks for a helpful response once in a while. It's the only pay we get from participation.

I find posts with multiple annonymouses confusing and annoying, as others have already stated. So you may choose to be impolite and ignor the intention of providing a name and I will choose to not respond to your questions.

Hi Bill,

I've always been impressed with this forum's S/N ratio and its general politeness toward rank newbies.
It was your postings on the gavemetric prep of buffers a few years ago that got us to rethink how we prepare our buffers in our test methods and GMP compliant labs. Our preps are now much faster and more importantly, self-checking. Thanks. I have always enjoyed your posts on the effects of the addition of organic modifiers to buffers. Your correction of the organic vs. inorganic myth was great because we are often in the low uv and I sure like the transparancy of phosphate.

I would argue that your time in retirement is more valuable than my time on salary! I hope any new software intices you back more often. You provide the signal, I'll provide the noise.

Tom, well said!

Related with "anonymous" username... how about a system to reserve an authentic identification in a way to be compulsory to use a password to accept the identification,... then you only could have one anonymous or one Peter, Tom, John,.... This could help

We will be moving to a new setup in the next few weeks. You can look at a "mock up" here:
http://www.sepsci.com/phpBB2/index.php

The new format will allow only registered users to post or reply to messages (registration is free). This will ensure one unique username per person (actually, one username per e-mail address).

Per various comments, we've gone back and stramlined the new setup so that is has three main posting areas (LC, GC, and MS), along with separate area for new, employment, and "off-topic" (general) conversations. Please try it out and post any comments back here.

Note: do *not* post any actual chromatography questions to the new setup. Everything that's on there now (including registration information) will disappear when we get the "real" version up and running.

What´s wrong? I get only "not found" when clicking on the above URL.

mea culpa!!! I moved everything to the "real" address:

http://www.sepsci.com/chromforum/index.php

What I didn't realize was that since I "moved" instead of "copied" the information, the original location is now dead.

Ok, it worked now. What I saw looks good. I tend to agree that more topics could become laborious. Also, I hope that one can see all the contributions to a post while replying, as is the case now.