Re: crappy "forum" software hiding recent posts?

I think you're asking for an un-threaded view, so that each post regardless of whether it's a reply to another or a "new" one appears in strict chronological order.

Noted. In the immediate term, while far from ideal, the (Atom) feed for each forum does provide that.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/feed/forum/2010/08/20/spanair_malware/

Have you forgotten your audience?

fwiw, I can assure you we spend a substantial amount of time thinking about our readers/users/commentards and making stuff better for them. The balance is always what is the most valuable use of the time/resources.

Obviously we *can* add voting to already published stories. We opted not to here.

The issue here was simply that we wanted subtle differences when compiling a list of the best stuff (Android apps) than we wanted when having a more free-form discussion.

The former wanted a url for the thing being rated, which made no sense for a regular discussion. The icons ("Where's the Paris Hilton angle?") also didn't seem approriate when building the list of top ten iphone games, etc. although I grant you that this could be debated. Possibly at length ;)

Compare

http://forums.reghardware.co.uk/forum/1/2010/05/03/top_ten_iphone_games/#comment-form

and

http://forums.reghardware.co.uk/forum/1/2010/04/30/review_peripherals_data_locker_enterprise_1tb/#comment-form

Then there is the list of suggestions/posts. Mixing (new) suggestions in between (older) discussion about stuff seemed like it might be more confusing than helpful.

And so we concluded: either it's a list of user suggestions to rate, or it's a discussion. And articles already published with discussion attached remain as that.

It's not perfect and we are curious how you'd like to see it work.