aka j wrote:
"If someone wants to have a little hacker sport one day, all they are required to do to put the message base in chaos is to reply to about 30 old discussion topics. Those old messages then push the current topics down a page and the discussions therein dies because no one reads the second page. :)"

That would be a limited view implementation. The approach to the problem is fairly straight forward and easy to counter such maneuvers that require at best limited intelligence. Many websites use this type of messaging and it works well. There are many ways to counter such measures but I'll keep them to myself as its proprietary intelligence. ;-)
I'm sure Craig can figure it out.

Eric