Hey all. I've just recently rejoined these forums since the Big Hack (I was "anarchoal"), and something that's annoying me (and, I notice, others) is the tendency for long threads to wander off-topic. Also, the admins seem to have a horrible task in trying to move off-topic posts to new threads. Yuck.
Now I'm a usenet lad at heart. For years (since 1997 or so) I've been using "forums" that look like this: http://www.panic.com/unison/images/screenshot-messages.jpg
In case that isn't clear, replies are placed beneath and indented from their parents, so each thread becomes a bunch of sub-threads. Off-topic sections can be ignored, or in a web type environment easily split. A main discussion can carry on while everything goes to hell in another sub-thread. It's basically all far more sensible than the current drupal flat-threading system.
Here's an (ugly) example of a similar system being used on a (drupal-based, I think) web forum: http://beta.ivrpa.org/node/439
I'm trying to look into whether it's possible to implement this in drupal and how to do it, but if I could figure it out, would this feature be desirable?
Here's a far prettier example, the drupal forums themselves:
http://drupal.org/node/105205