I don't *think* I changed the avatar here recently? I do try and keep to the same ones for all forums (but TSF seems to insist you use theirs, rather than your own), and I haven't changed the Answers one for a year or more - but I tend to use defaults for a while until I've got the feel of a forum.
IKWYM about Answers - it's a bad case of MS not dogfooding. You can bet their internal forums use a totally different engine, again. They never really understood NNTP, and I don't think they understand forums, either - the latest round of changes was obviously driven by the need to force acceptance of Win8 as a serious platform, which it won't/can't be until everyone has a touch-screen computer. I can see that there will be more changes coming soon - and probably more significant ones - before the Win8 launch.
