It's a fine guidance for the audience of end users, that also sets a measure for what can be explained to beginners. I would have been tempted to give much more detailed advice about the various difficulties encountered when working with the forum in its present shape, e. g., spoilt line breaks, resume editing that was interrupted by session timeout, and posting indentation peculiarities affected by long urls.
But you are right, this would be too much, and therefore the usage problems must be solved rather than described.
Furthermore, the link collection scenario is a good example for the forums usage pattern that does not just substitute a listserv list distributing to mailboxes. I am very curious to get to know how your end users at other sites follow this usage pattern and what you recommend them to control their alerts. As soon as they discover that they can read the entire content within their mailboxes, they might switch back to the simple spamming style of discussion, right?
I therefore think that some recommendations are needed regarding notifications/alerts, and that perhaps some functionality should be changed if it turns out that the unsatisfactory usage patterns that Bruce mentions are a common problem.
I am also looking forward to UAB work to address these usability problems.
