Good points, Andrew. So do you think it would make sense to offer e-mail digests of posts, but only allow responses from the web page itself? Most of your bullet points - that is, attempted bullet points

- seem to deal with reading posts, not responding.
List bullets - that's strange; I never noticed that. Probably because I never tried using the [*] outside a list; I just followed the instructions instead.

Note that in your post, I don't see any "empty" bullet. The first is a filled-in round bullet; the second is a filled-in square. Looks the same in Mozilla, Opera, and IE. Do you still see something different?
The UBB code to parse submitted posts does some strange things sometimes. Sometimes it seems to depend on whether there's a space in front of a tag, or what other tags are also one the page, or the phase of the moon, or something else. :roll: I've made a few attempts to make sense of it, but with little luck.