[fastforward]

The date you have elected to use for posts in your control panel will determine whether these functions are needed.

If you remove the order by seq line and you have selected nntpdate in your control panel, then usenet posts will not be ordered correctly for reasons explained in several posts in this thread. To get around it the posts are 'sequenced' and the thread is ordered using that column. The order_local_posts() function is to allow people to use the nntp date without editing the newreply.php file. It will simply add the sequence number for any local posts when the script is executed.

This is all irrelevent in the next release anyway so I shouldn't worry about it to much. But the bottom line is in the current version, those things are needed unless you want confused users.