[Jessica Boucher]

Well, there is some truth in that it's the audience. But not the CD audience - the audience in general.

It's been proven that the average web surfer spends seconds looking at a website before they move on or decide to keep reading. Newspapers use a term called "above the fold" or "below the fold": referring to the fold in the newspaper - the most important stuff is put above the fold so that when it's seen in the newsstand the headlines attract your attention. This stuff happens all the time.

Yes, lengthy posts are sometimes skipped over because of length and....well, in the end it's the reader's loss if they don't want to read it. But there are ways to add a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

• Formatting is your friend! We have all these neat tags on the forums, we might as well put them to good use. Use bold to accentuate what you're trying to say in a really long post, and more likely than not even if the body is long but the bolding is still at the part of the screen where you don't have to scroll, it will be read.
• Break up the post. Not only with the enter key, but adding lists make your post seem easier to swallow.

And, if you're a reader and you want to catch up on a long thread, in the "Thread Tools" box there is "Subscribe to thread" - subscribe to the long ones so that you don't have to dig for them later! You can set your settings so that you're not recieving emails every time someone replies to the thread as well.