[bbDev] ?replies=#

[fel64 at loinhead.net]

I never really figured out what the ?replies=# was about, but having seen
Joel Spolsky's "Building Communities with Software"
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html, a
discussion about how he built his forums, this makes best sense to me:

> Q. Why don't you have some kind of system so I can see what posts I've
already read?

> A. We have the best system that can be implemented in a distributed,
scalable fashion: we let everyone's browser keep track of it. Web
browsers will change the color of the links you've already visited from
blue to purple. So all we have to do is subtly change the URL for each
topic to include the number of replies available; that way when there
are additional replies the post will appear in the "unread" color again.

> Anything more elaborate than this would be harder to build and would
needlessly complicate the UI.

So I guess that's why it's implemented in bb. But I've never seen a theme
take advantage of that. I'm sure there's a couple out there, but kakumei
doesn't, bb.org doesn't, like I said - I don't actually know of any that
do. If it's not being used and merely uglifies the URIs, why not take it
out? Maybe make it into a plugin for anyone that does want to use it.
Otherwise, why not change kakumei to take advantage of it?