I understand your complaint, though. This software is heavily adapted from WordPress, and the most awkward part of the adaptation is continuing to use admin pages from the WordPress dashboard for ordinary poster tasks like composing and editing. Sucks big time, on that we can agree.

You can make the cramped overlay window a little roomier, if you haven’t already, by clicking the top-right “Screen options” link and selecting a one-column layout. Also, the various blocks on that page are draggable, and you can rearrange the order so that the handful you use all the time are at the top: The editor, the excerpt, the control panel (“Publish” button).

Long term I intend to get rid of the dashboard, for everybody but me and podrock, and integrate the stuff you need right into the user interface. In the UI of my imagination, all editors are integrated into the page the way the new-comment editor is integrated. No more floating overlay windows. The latest version of WordPress added a modular WYSIWYG editor, and so finally I’ll be able to give you rich text on comments as well as posts.

You have a netbook, eh? I just got a Samsung tablet, 1024×600 screen. My business reason for getting it is to start designing UIs to work on screens that small. What I’m seeing is that the small devices use more of a “kiosk” design philosophy than the classic “GUI” we’ve been using for three decades. You generally only see one thing on the screen at a time, and spend a lot of time moving from panel to panel. It won’t be easy shoehorning a forum into that environment, but I’ve been playing with it. This is just playing around, but how about some feedback?

I’m still using the paragraph markers, but now when I put them in, the comment doesn’t accept them at the first posting and I have to edit them in afterwards.

This is just my personal idiosyncracy, because I read comments a lot at the dashboard interface, and the title lines don’t show up there. I can work with it, and don’t see any reason to change it from its current new format.

But the comment edit window is the same as “Start new topic”.

I have gotten used to the fact that I have to post a comment, then fix the completed comment in the more robust edit mode for errors, format issues, and adding graphics.

I think Robert is working on that, but adding robust editing to the top level isn’t going to be easy.