customize forumdisplay, linear message view

[evan2nave]

Thank you for your response. A couple points:

1. That's true that it could be a lot of data, but theoretically that could be true within a single thread that has multiple posts each with many replies, and there's a linear message view for the threads.
2. There are major forums that do offer this feature, such as yahoo as an option, and the investorvillage example I pointed to.
a. The investor forums are a good example of content where this view makes sense, because within a forum (not a thread) for a particular company that people are talking about, people are generally just interested in the latest thing said about it, regardless of the thread. Of course, this is subjective, but there is a desire for it among certain communities.
3. It's not as if every single message would need to be shown at once on a page, since the page would only need to show some number of messages at once, with prev and next links to paginate.

In any case, there are certainly forums out there that provide this feature. Does anyone have any ideas about doing this in vbulletin, or better yet, has anyone done it?

Thanks,
-Evan