Ok I'm actually having second thoughts about this now...
But essentially the difference between OKP and all the other forums I participate in is that OKP hasn't moved to that 'flat' style of posting that most other places have.

To elaborate - at okp when you start a thread, people post, and then they reply to either the original post (keeping the thread flat) *or* they reply to a reply, which creates that branched structure we're used to here. I think that has its pros and cons and I'm curious to see what other people have to say about it.

Basically the more up-to-date way of doing it would be to not create those branches, and keep everything 'flat.' This improves functionality a great deal in my opinion. Posts should be divided up into pages, and users should have the ability to jump from page to page, right away, even from the page that lists all the threads in the first place.

I can appreciate the branched structure, as it allows people to have multiple discussions take place in a single thread. But at the same time I wonder if those multiple discussions warrant their *own threads* which would invite more participation in any given topic (since it would be displayed more prominently than burried in an existing thread.) Furthermore, it's still possible to 'reply to replies' as long as there's a strong quote function in the forum software.

To me the branches overly-complicate the discussion, and limit the participation. It's also a pain to be clicking around post-by-post within a branch. There's no need to display links to each and every post if they're all displayed by default and divided neatly into managable pages.

This is hard to articulate in text, so hopefully I've got some people's gears going who want to help me, or who want to ask more questions about the changes etc...