Fine, quite a few people here seem to think UBB or other BB software sucks. But, one feature that they all(?) have that IMO would be useful here is the listing of threads by last response time.

The track threads feature is great for the regulars, but this should help eliminate some of the re-posts that are happening more and more frequently. As I'm sure you've noticed, the S4 board is inundated multiple times daily with people coming in asking "I heard the new S4 is gonna have xxx hp and a xxx engine, what have you guys heard?". By having the original thread bumped back to the top of the thread listings (by someone just making a post to it), the newbie (or whoever's asking) could just read through that, as opposed to having various fed up people flaming him. I'm sure other boards have (somewhat) similar situations. Another example is the pics of the WRX that drove into the lake, which has been posted at least three times lately.

the other formats that allow "bumping" of messages create a lot of clutter (spam, if you will) at the top of the postings. I'd rather watch a thread I find uninteresting fade off into the sunset than have to see it front and center every time I check in.

I think we all could benefit from using the search option a little more often. That + the tracked threads feature = a pretty kickass message board that pleases most everyone.

the flip side of that is that there are often times where a thread will go off onto a tangent, which you might find interesting, whereas you just skimmed over the original thread.

For example, somoene posts something like "Anybody selling an RS4 intercooler?". You skim over it since you don't have one, nor are you really interested in getting one (for whatever reason). It scrolls down, goes to page two, you never see it again. In the meantime, the thread develops into a technical discussion of how an IC works, why the RS4 IC wouldn't work as an easy mod in your car, and how an IC fits into the scheme of a turbo'ed car in general - a subject which you would find interesting. But, since it's scrolled down past your reading point, you never know about that thread. Now if threads were bumped up to the top by last reply, you'd see there was a lot of responses on that post (if you have threads collapsed), and you'd wonder why there's 50+ responses to someone wanting to buy an RS4 IC, and you'd take a look inside.

I prefer to leave the control in the readers hands, not the posters.

usually (from what I've seen on the other forums I frequent). And it's not just some reposts. How many times have you seen "I saw in [whatever mag] that the next S4 will have xxxhp and a xxx engine"?

As a control, you could let the moderators lock the thread if it gets too annoying (like if someone constantly bumps theirs to the top), which is how UBB does it.

I'd guess many people who don't read the forums all the time don't usually read that far back from the current first page. So, another situation I've noticed is that someone will ask a valid on topic question say at 11pm, various other topics (flame wars/color wars/etc) pop up, and that question gets pushed to page 3 by the following morning, and the question never gets answered.

People will still post "I saw in [whatever mag] that the next S4 will have xxxhp and a xxx engine" regardless how we sort threads.

The reason people repost threads is to make people see it. Same thing with bumping. They'll just use a different way to get to their desired result.

As for your valid topic, if no one responds to it, the same thing will happen with the UBB style sorting too.

Yes, there's a couple of bugs I haven't gotten around to fixing yet.