I've just read the last entry of Tidings as of the time of this writing. BTW: how could one link to an individual one? <a name> tags are missing that I can see - unless an author feels like manually adding it... PM is generally very precise about stable cross linking... thus IMHO a suitable mechanism should be provided...
Whatever, that is an aside: I've just read the last entry of Tidings and it says:
In The Monastery Gates and the posting sections (Seekers of Perl Wisdom, etc.),
the metadata shown for each node includes the count of replies.
This can be either the total number of replies (all "descendents")
or just the number of direct replies (immediate "children").
You select which in your User Settings — a checkbox labeled
"Show count of all replies".
When you have selected showing only the count of direct replies
(the option is unchecked), then The Monastery Gates, etc. will show counts
labeled as "N direct replies". Previously it said
"N replies", just as in the other case.
Why not allowing both à la: "Direct replies #N / Total replies #M"?
On a more general basis, to be fair I've read both talexb's request for more advanced statistics in nodes' headers for posting sections and jdporter's reply to the point of that kind of info already being in RAT and... requiring "significantly non-trivial change" to be brought elsewhere. Now, such a change appears to have been done, which is why I could post this very message, and... the next step would be to allow for some customized header to be defined in terms of a user supplied string along with some placeholder variables for replies, direct replies, and so on. A dream?