Yep, improving the forum would help a lot, in a lot of ways.
I've often thought that the structure of the news.arc forum is rather unhelpful for the arc community, especially now that we're so small and lethargic. Conversations can go extended periods of time without comment, so they get locked. Or they fall off the front page, and hard to find again. Neither is conducive to long-term development and improvement; we probably lose a lot of valuable work and ideas that way.
One thing I'm considering as part of developing a new community site is collecting and archiving all of the arclanguage.org content, so we can actually access it. And preserve it, if the site goes down.
But I end up wasting all my time on discussion, instead of actually making progress on that...
Anyone know how long an IP stays banned? Or what I can do about it? Rather inconvenient not to be able to check the forum from home...
I suppose I could set up a proxy or something. And I was planning on scraping everything to a new community site anyway, so maybe I should take this as the incentive to do so.
Looks as though it ranks how bad you are and always keeps the baddest of the bad-asses in cache, while never deleting any from disk. In a low volume site like this I doubt you'll get out of it without contacting them.
I did ping the HN admins about the lock period a year or two ago, and they were kind enough to extend it for us. It's now 90 days, if I recall correctly.