Something like this is possible, of course; however, my experience with other forums in the past has been that the board virtually dies when something like this is done. Several boards which I administered in the past which were completely open and were tremendously active died overnight as soon as restrictions were put in place which required anything other than typing something and pressing enter.

If I may mention the name "parsimony," they implemented posting moderation in the middle of a situation which was causing their forums to be closed by aggressive people with just that in mind, smearing text, profanities, p0rnographic photos and things like user passwords etc. into the forums. Us mods and admins had to sleep with one ear towards the sms or email which said that something had been posted, so we could jump out of bed and check and remove the posting immediately if necessary. And just at the point where an important forum of mine was about to have to be closed, the posting moderation feature was offered as an option, and overnight the door was slammed shut on the type of naggers who smear boards full of destructive shit.

People want and need to be able to just write something spontaneously, and that's what a really active forum lives from. And the only true solution to the problem IMHO is posting moderation, which involves no complicaton for the writere and near immediate presentation of the posting, most forum users are familiar with it and accept this.

I am (was, I'm now 66) a professional programmer and I can't imagine that the option would be so terribly extensive: a flag field on the database and only flagged postings (those released by the admin or mod) are displayed, along with some code of course.

mlf is tremendous, and I know that it's not in place for me to be demanding, and I don't want to be, in any sense. I just hope that a feature like this is up high on the mlf development priority list!

Thanks for the fact that this great, simple forum exists and is available for dummies like me!

All the best,
Ralph
ralphdn