Wedge

The reason for not including the start date in the message index is simply becaue it's already VERY CLUTTERED and putting in more clutter makes it harder to use, not easier.

I'd also note that most of the time people do not care when a thread was started.

Hmm well, we could do it on hover or something though...

I guess, but I think I'd rather avoid it entirely, I just think it's too much stuff in the message index, even if it's not immediately visible.

Twitter, for instance, now hides their action links by default and shows them on hover... Like thoughts here btw (nope, unrelated :P)
And they have the same problem too: if you just want to select the text behind the action links... Well, you can't :lol:

Anyway, I'm more of a "hiding is okay" guy because then things can be shown again later, eh, after all there's the full editor link below, and you're well aware that we still load all of its HTML... :whistle:

It's complicated, but in most of the cases, if you don't have that information directly, you have to have some manner of displaying it, which often requires actually having some other UI - hover to display something is a bit annoying. (In the case of thoughts, hovering actively shows you UI, which is cleaner than having the UI there all the time, and it's cleaner than having to hover to actually do anything because you'll be hovering in order to click Reply or whatever)

I'm well aware of the behaviour of the quick reply but I suspect that will actually provoke some use, as opposed to an item that people may not even know is there.

Could care less about start date/time, plus can't I see that on the message itself?

You can see it on the topic itself by looking at the first message, but there's nowhere to show it otherwise (and I'm not sure it would be useful in most cases either, I generally don't care how old a topic is when replying to it... only when the last post was made)