I understand what you're saying. As with many things, there are multiple ways to accomplish the same overall basic result, and each way as its own set of advantages and disadvantages. I considered some choices and decided on what I felt was best for me; this hack is primarily for me and my own board. I just put it here in case anybody else, after considering what it does and how it does it, decides that this is right for him/her and his/her board, too.
But you seem to have uncovered a bug in my system...I'm assuming that you signed a news post with "dock" in bold. Then you deleted the original thread. As it is now, deleting the thread has no effect on the news item, and the news item relies on the threadid to get the forumid, and if the script can't get a forumid, it causes a database error.
I guess what would make the most sense here is for me to fix it so that when a thread is deleted, a news item with the same threadid also gets deleted. In other words, if you delete a thread, any news item from that thread also gets deleted. Anyone have any thoughts on that?