Forums:
Until recently there had been little need to implement the Forum facility on this site.
Without collaborative projects this had hardly seemed necessary.
Recently however a collaborative project has arisen and the Forum system provides the opportunity to give background information so that subsequent recruits to the project may catch up. A much easier method than having to organise emails.
Administration
To keep the administration tasks low and in view of the numerous attacks on this site (and presumably other similar Scratchpad sites) from bots originating in the USA I am restricting membership to people contacting me directly through normal email channels.
Apologies if you were ignored during the past 19 months, there was no feature that membership would have provided. There were maybe one or two real applications out of 40 registrations