h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Looked around the site on and off for quite a long time, some puzzling things ... my posting, which could only have been done today since this is my first day, appears as having been posted "2 days ago" ... hmmm ... an eddy in the space-time continuum no doubt and therefore entirely in character with H2G2. The miscellaneous chat, which I expected to be buzzing with updates moment to moment, seems to be very slow and unexciting, maybe the really good stuff goes on in the conversations associated with individual entries, but ... how do you find the good conversations? Aha ... someone wrote to me, that was nice, and fast too. But the conversation is taking place not in the Peer Review page, which might encourage others to join in, but in the area associated with the entry itself, which people won't find unless they're looking for it. There's something odd about this interface that I can't quite put into words, it doesn't quite flow as I would expect. It took a while to figure out that a "forum" was just an alternative use for an entry, rather than a species in its own right, and the forums that I visited seem to be rather sedate. Then there's the search facility, which apparently defaults to searching the Edited Guide only, unless you subsequently notice that you can specify a wider search. Why doesn't it just search all entries the first time around? I hink what I'm groping for here is that the whole thing isn't intuitive enough to a "newbie" - well, not this newbie anyway, despite my years on the Web. On the other hand, that encourages you to explore for yourself if you're the type to do so, but I wonder how many get discouraged?