The original version had the Subject and Name entries switching from the standard Input type entry to Rich Text and back.  The problem was when text is written to an Input type entry is has to be "encoded" so special characters like HTML contains don't spill over.

That problem is easy to solve going from the board software to the form.  Switching from the old-style Input areas to Rich Text worked just fine.  The board software has no problem writing the encoded text the Input areas need.

But switching from Rich Text back to plain Input areas was a problem for Internet Explorer.  The Javascript used to encode the Input area text the same way as the board software does it (so the data returned when you post the message is recognized) works in every browser except Internet Explorer.  IE just ignores that stuff and what happens is the Input areas show up empty.

To get around that I had to switch the text input areas from Input to Textarea, because Textarea can handle the text without any encoding.

So therefore right now, until I find a fix for that particular Javascript bug in IE there are only a few choices:

1.  Keep the Textarea blanks until the problem has a fix.

2.  Make it so you can only switch from the old-style form to Rich Text ONCE, irreversibly (that would surely generate a lot of complaints).

3.  Eliminate Rich Text for Internet Explorer.  Which would suck for a lot of people since IE is still the world's most popular browser and some people might want to use Rich Text.

4.  Eliminate Rich Text altogether from the board software.  That would suck for even more people since a lot of people like it.  At least I think they do.  

I do make an effort to make the board as backward compatible and recognizable as possible.  Sometimes it doesn't work perfectly - and there will always be people who say "put it back the way it was" if the board is even slightly different from the day it started.  

I've resisted making the board more dependent on things like Javascript and Ajax because those would be more drastic changes.  There's a whole list of features I passed on adding because they would change things too much and there was no way to maintain the basics.  Rich Text, in fact, was back-burnered many times simply because I couldn't make it integrate as well as it does now without giving up too much.

That said, as soon as I figure out how to fix that IE problem the old Input blanks will make a return.  There are too many problems, ironically, with Textareas in IE to leave it that way permanently if I can avoid it.