The strength of this board is that popular topics can remain on top for longer.
The strength of the other board format is that you can get a gist of entire conversations by quickly looking at the threading and the headers.
I always thought the second format was ideal, but I thought the first format was more appropriate for high volume sites where threading would cause conversations to extend to the end of the universe (i.e. off the end of the page), thus killing the main benefit of the format. Low volume sites are more suited for the second format because you can quickly catch up on what's going on without reading everything and you can get a gist of the conversation just by reading headers...heck, most of the time with us, you could read the entire conversation without actually clicking on a header. And you can easily see where subconversations started and ended with a glance, something you can't do with this one.
Sine if you wanted to get super fancy and make an OSS project the envy of your peers, create a Model View Controller (MVC) message board framework where you can view the data using either board format, but the data model remains the same. I'd do it myself, but I'm a lazy fuck. ;)
Oh hell, I might just do it anyway and throw it up on freshmeat with all the other crap over there. It'd be a good excuse for me to learn PHP.
The strength of the other board format is that you can get a gist of entire conversations by quickly looking at the threading and the headers.
I always thought the second format was ideal, but I thought the first format was more appropriate for high volume sites where threading would cause conversations to extend to the end of the universe (i.e. off the end of the page), thus killing the main benefit of the format. Low volume sites are more suited for the second format because you can quickly catch up on what's going on without reading everything and you can get a gist of the conversation just by reading headers...heck, most of the time with us, you could read the entire conversation without actually clicking on a header. And you can easily see where subconversations started and ended with a glance, something you can't do with this one.
Sine if you wanted to get super fancy and make an OSS project the envy of your peers, create a Model View Controller (MVC) message board framework where you can view the data using either board format, but the data model remains the same. I'd do it myself, but I'm a lazy fuck. ;)
Oh hell, I might just do it anyway and throw it up on freshmeat with all the other crap over there. It'd be a good excuse for me to learn PHP.
