The claim was about traffic, in the context of readability, not who posts. Do you really think that less anons than logged in users read this site? That seems unlikely given the handful of active monks vs billions of people online.

> The claim was about traffic

Casual readers come via search engines and are normally directed to sub threads and not to the root node. They are looking for a special answer and won't read a whole thread but rather skip to the next search hit.

Those people want best-first ordering and most sub threads are short and/or linear chains.

And they will face other problems anyway, Google often links to other displaytype like print or xml nodes here.

Your complaints would only make sense for regular readers who understand the tree topology here and want to follow a thread chronologically.

But those will already know how to log in.

Your claims sound far fetched and unfunded.

I'm not against a more intuitive and interactive design, but "best first" is not the most urgent problem.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

Those people want best-first ordering and most sub threads are short and/or linear

that's a good point, even if it can be inconvenient for regular readers. As a regular reader, i don't mind at all though.

On the other hand, best-first or whatever is the ordering, tabbing can be made narrower so that deep threads do not show weirdly slim (maybe use different colors too). And also, for anon-users it is inconvenient to stop showing threads at a certain depth unless it is a performance problem/database access (in which case nothing beats that argument), i would suggest less left-tab and show threads all the way down. Keep the order as it is now. my 2 cents if anybody asked for them.

Those people want best-first ordering

How do you know what we want? The whole point of this thread is that it's not what "we" want. We want to read threads as they were posted, rather than the jumbled results of a bogus popularity contest.