customize forumdisplay, linear message view

[evan2nave]

Hello,

Has anyone customized a display for a forum page (forumdisplay.php), in which you give a linear, non-threaded display of all messages chronologically within the forum. In this view, the latest reply to a post in any thread would appear at the top of the forum page. Posting a new thread or a reply to a post in an existing thread would appear the same to users in this view, although the system would still retain the thread hierarchy of responses, such that one could switch back to the standard thread display for a forum.

This functionality already exists in vBulletin out-of-the-box within a specific thread—it’s just the linear view for the thread. But the idea is to do the same thing for all of the posts within an entire forum, not just within a thread for the forum. This would actually not be a very obscure feature—several large forums provide this type of view. For example, it is the default at investorvillage.com. And Yahoo Message Boards provide it as an option as well. When you are viewing a specific forum, by default it will “List in Topics” but you can select to “List as Individual Messages” and it will provide this linear message view across all the threads of the forum.

E.g. Suppose you have the following threads:

Thread A: Posted 1:00pm
Response A1: Posted 1:30pm
Response A2: Posted 2:30pm

Thread B: Posted 2:00pm
Response B1: Posted 2:15pm
Response B2: Posted 2:45pm

In the standard forumdisplay, one would see:

Thread B Last Post 2:45 Replies 2
Thread A Last Post 2:30 Replies 2

In this new linear forumdisplay, the new thread posts, as well as the replies, would all be at the same level. One would see:

Response B2 Posted 2:45pm
Response A2 Posted 2:30pm
Response B1 Posted 2:15pm
Thread B Posted 2:00pm
Response A1 Posted 1:30pm
Thread A Posted 1:00pm

When any top level thread post OR a response post is selected, you’ll just go to the normal showthread.php view of the message, perhaps in the hybrid view.

Has anyone already implemented something like this that they would be willing to share, or does anyone have any suggestions or ideas about issues that might be involved in implementing this customization?

Thanks very much for any help,
-Evan