What's the point of subjects in posts?

[Maes]

They normally are not visible (I think) so other than some witty hidden message to whoever quotes your posts, do they have any actual use for non-first posts in a thread? Can they be seen with some setting? Were they visible by default in some older Doomworld era?

[schwerpunk]

I know on some other phpbb forums I visit the subject is visible above every post. Must have to do with the skin the forum uses.

To my knowledge, DW only has the one skin.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Probably a holdover from those awful threaded layouts forums used to use, where every reply was nested under the OP in the index. Anyone remember *nt* replies?

Also like schwerpunk said, there are layouts/themes that show these titles above posts.

[Clonehunter]

Some forums only show it if typed in, while I've seen others that, for no known purpose, have placeholder text that shows up. Generally it's obnoxious.

[darknation]

you know, I never even noticed.

[Zed]

I don't get it. Do you mean that you can "put titles" in posts (not threads) in this forum? That seems like an irrelevant feature.

[Maes]

Zed said:

I don't get it. Do you mean that you can "put titles" in posts (not threads) in this forum? That seems like an irrelevant feature.

Well.... try replying to this post ;-)

[Obsidian]

Or this post.

[Maes]

darknation said:

you know, I never even noticed.

Maybe you need to look closer.

[Hellbent]

The subject is optional Maes. What's all the fuss? No, I'm kidding. I've actually been wondering the same thing every single time I make a post for as far back as I can remember. Maybe a great and venerable mod will shed some light on this issue once and for all.

edit: I think I actually know the reason, and thus never bothered to ask about it: removing it for reply posts would require more programming, and since it being there in replies doesn't do any harm, they just left it like that.

[geo]

I think that the subjects are just in the forum code and someone needs to hide the post subjects.

[Blzut3]

they show up in the printable version of the thread.

[Krispy]

It is a bit confusing, I always thought.

[Quasar]

It used to be visible; it was intentionally removed by Linguica, IIRC.

[Grazza]

Indeed, that's how it was on the old forums, and it didn't add much. Here is an example.