I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS.

I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh

EDITED: *conversations

Threaded conversations are really good because you can have branching discussions that don't interfere with each other.

But the only forum I know of that realised how to properly do it is this old Russian software forum [1] You need a mail client-like interface so that you can see your place in the discussion.

Triple quoting someone and trying to read the actual thread in a flat forum sucked then and sucks now.

[1] Example link http://rsdn.org/?forum/philosophy/8357952

Check out the D language forums. Easily the best forum software I've seen.

What are they using?