Why is Post New Thread a feature when reading a thread?

It gets a bit annoying when you want to reply to someone's thread and end up in the new thread interface instead, plus I don't really understand the point of having it there anyway.

Fortunately it gets easier to stop making that mistake once you start asking yourself "Why is it prompting me for a title?".

Do you always include a post subject when replying? I've found that remembering I don't need a title will let me know if I accidentally started a thread. In that even, I cut the text and then go back to the thread in question and hit reply instead, pasting my finished response. No harm no foul.

The forum software was written in the very old days back when internet forums were a new thing that had just started to replace nntp and email chains for conversations on the internet.

Nobody yet knew that starting a new thread from within a thread would be something nobody would actually want.

What if someone updated it? I mean,

Powered by: vBulletin Version 2.2.5
Copyright ©2000, 2001, Jelsoft Enterprises Limited.

That's kinda old.

They made it to at least v2.25 before anyone noticed that was a stupid feature. Says a lot about software designers methinks.

I never quite got it myself either. Just another quirk of the very old software. Another thing I don't like is how unread posts are handled - totally unintuitive, but I guess it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Marnetmar said:

you want to reply to someone's thread and end up in the new thread interface instead

I think I've yet to make that mistake, but do occasionally hit "Edit/Delete" instead of "Quote".

Isn't that a forum standard?

Well if you want a split thread, that comes handy.

I use it sometimes if reading a thread gives me an idea for a different thread.

The search function of this forum is awful though. I just go to google and type site:doomworld.com after searching for something to find old threads.

40oz said:

I use it sometimes if reading a thread gives me an idea for a different thread.

I assumed that was the purpose of the New Thread function being available on every thread.

The search function of this forum is awful though. I just go to google and type site:doomworld.com after searching for something to find old threads.

Indeed.
I've noticed most forum search engines are bad.

mallo said:

What if someone updated it? I mean,

That's kinda old.

I'm not familiar with what the features of the newer vBulletin has. What is the newer forum software capable of that we can't do. Other than convenience, I can't think up much we don't have the ability to do. I don't think we can strike through text, that's all I can think up. edit: OK never mind, turns out we can do strike through on the doomworld fourms. Thank you GreyGhost.

reality 2.0 said:

I don't think we can strike through text, that's all I can think up.

FTFY

If/when the forums migrate to a newer version of vBulletin, I expect the first thing the admins will do is disable most of the eye candy features, which are little more than distractions.