This is personal taste, but the one thing I don't like about these new forums is that someone can post a topic, after a while it'll make it's way down the forum to where older posts are, but if someone responds to it a month later, it get's bumped up the top of the page (I hope I'm being clear here).  Well, it's not a huge deal, but I was wondering if there's anyway for me to get rid of that feature, so that posts will be entirely in chronological order.  Do other people feel the same way?  Can this be done on an individual basis, or only for everyone?  Any thoughts one way or another?

cheers,

-avatar!

Hmm.. If this can be done, I'd hope it would be a personal account setting and not globally set for everyone. I rather like the way it's being handled now. But I can see how some others wouldn't.

I can see how so as well. On the old board not being able to bump any given thread kept threads relatively clean and the community pretty closed even though no registration was required.

Almost every forum I've ever been on does this. In fact, I can't think of any save the old STC that *didn't*, or at least give a choice on the matter (like Gamefaqs, where this behavior is still the default).

(Edit: Now I remember, a lot of them do act similarly to STC-olds, but really, this way is far far better, because as Stephen says, it shows what's active. If you want to pull up an old thread, use search)

-Joshua

Every forum that uses this vertical thread model acts the same way.  The forum is designed to allow the user to see recent activity on any thread, rather than preserve the message hierarchy.  The original threaded model and this recent activity model are two drastically different programming designs, so it is not easy at all to make forum software act both ways.   

For the majority of regular users, it seems they are much more interested in seeing recent activity rather than digging up a specific thread to see if there is activity.  Forums are now acting like semi-chat rooms using the "recent activity" model.