This too is my primary concern about/reservation with the "sub-board" stuff. I'm completely flexible about it (I too use the "View unread posts" feature), but it's not really a "sub-board" when it's implying a hierarchical layout (yet isn't). If the sub-boards were listed under a "category" and that category wasn't a forum/board itself, it would make much more logical sense.rainwarrior wrote:The way things are structured here, though, puts posts themselves in very exclusive categories. You don't get to see "SNESdev" posts in the "Other retro dev" stream, they are effectively separate forums, and the tree structure is totally wasted, because the only thing that's really in a tree is the presentation of links between forums. The posts themselves are not functionally acting as if they had a hierarchy.
One has to remember (speaking generally here, not at rainwarrior): the common usability of a forum as a whole is, IMO, more important than presenting an illusion of a hierarchical tree (what phpBB calls sub-boards). I believe a balance between the two can be achieved in some manner, I just don't know what to recommend that's within the confines/design of phpBB.
In short: the previous layout seemed good to me, but as I said, I'm flexible in this regard. :-)