No. This is not a private forum. Any other user can read your entries.
There is no option to enter private mail that is sent only to one person or group of persons.
In fact, privacy defeats the whole purpose of these messages.
Ideally, there are lots of exchanges and sharing of information publicly here.
No. You can not use HTML tags in your message.
The message board will just throw out everything between < >.
Use the option link URL to direct the readers of your message to an html file, if you wish.
Colons appear in the message dialog box when you try to followup up on a
message to indicate that those lines are quoting the previous document.
(this feature is not enabled on this web site's messaging area)
Your post most likely did not show up, because your browser did not reload the
page, it simply pulled it out of cache. Please reload your browser and it
should then appear.