I suggest having a specific agenda for the meeting which is either laid out by the ranking officer at the beginning or standard each week. That way we are less likely to be sidetracked. Further, as @blaze said,

posting from different time zones and life occupations means we can’t lead dialogues (on the forum) very well, so each post should cover almost everything an officer has to say about a topic.

Given an agenda, each person could go through and offer thoughts, opinions, suggestions, comments, questions, etc. for each topic the first time they post, and add more later as the conversation dictates.