Eventually, listing the highest-hit individual posts as part of the
thread hit listing would be ideal, but even without that,
just returning the thread hit in search looks like a big
improvement. Thank you, Tilmann and Dave!
Hm, in Forums, although each individual post always has its own
message_id, Forums gives a link to display just that one post (and its
direct replies) only if the poster assigned a different
subject line, rather than accepting the default subject. That's kind
of disconcerting. Occasionally you want to give a link to an
individual post, so there should be a (small, unobtrusive) link on
each post for displaying just that post.
It'd also be very nice to have
<a name="message_id_foo"></a>
anchors embedded in the page too, so you could display the entire
thread but zooming in on a particular post. The UI decision of
whether to make display using those name tags the default behavior for
viewing a single post could (and should) be postponed to a later date,
just sticking the name tags into the Forums HTML hurts nothing and
would definitely be worthwhile.
Simple Matters of Programming, I guess. I'm sure others have thought
of this too, just figured I'd point it out anyway...