[lazyjones]

Ugh.

I don't know where this hate of threaded forums comes from, but these arguments are obviously based on something emotional rather than rational. If you don't know where the heck you are in a threaded forum, where sub-threads often have changed subjects and you can quickly navigate up and down in that subthread(!), how would you know where you are in a flat discussion where people just quote some bits and just pretend they are in a subthread (they are discussing a sub-topic, the context for the post you're reading is spread over 2-3 other posts somewhere on the past ~10 pages on typical boards)?

New replies can easily be found through a special display of new (unread or recent) posts, in our forum we just display the subject in bold or green (if it is a reply to your post), it works fine.

One of the best implementation of threaded discussions is slashdot, where you can find the interesting stuff quickly even when there are more than 1000 posts. Please show me a comparable flat forum.

It's terrible that the crappy flat forums (you know, that widespread PHP-written stuff that is regularly exploited) broke threaded discussions for so many people, because they decided to go "guestbook style" (that's what it is - a guestbook, not a discussion, despite the lame attempts of some people to quote each other so they could pretend to stick to a topic) and never look back. I can only conclude that flat forums are preferred by people who don't really like discussions, they like Q&A (like SO) or guestbooks, or perhaps a maximum of ~10 replies on any subject. That works fine as a flat list. For the rest of us, threaded forums have worked fine since the BBS and Usenet times.