Casual readers come via search engines and are normally directed to sub threads and not to the root node. They are looking for a special answer and won't read a whole thread but rather skip to the next search hit.

Those people want best-first ordering and most sub threads are short and/or linear chains.

And they will face other problems anyway, Google often links to other displaytype like print or xml nodes here.

Your complaints would only make sense for regular readers who understand the tree topology here and want to follow a thread chronologically.

But those will already know how to log in.

Your claims sound far fetched and unfunded.

I'm not against a more intuitive and interactive design, but "best first" is not the most urgent problem.

Those people want best-first ordering and most sub threads are short and/or linear

that's a good point, even if it can be inconvenient for regular readers. As a regular reader, i don't mind at all though.

On the other hand, best-first or whatever is the ordering, tabbing can be made narrower so that deep threads do not show weirdly slim (maybe use different colors too). And also, for anon-users it is inconvenient to stop showing threads at a certain depth unless it is a performance problem/database access (in which case nothing beats that argument), i would suggest less left-tab and show threads all the way down. Keep the order as it is now. my 2 cents if anybody asked for them.

Those people want best-first ordering

How do you know what we want? The whole point of this thread is that it's not what "we" want. We want to read threads as they were posted, rather than the jumbled results of a bogus popularity contest.

We want ...

I'm pretty sure you don't speak for all visitors to the site.

If you don't like the default, log in and set your own settings.

I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

> How do you know what we want?

well ... "Tends to be true of all public sites on the web."

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}