I was rather against the idea of segregating Lin threads into their own subforum, but the most recent explosion does seems over the top. A possible approach to improving things would be to take greater advantage of the thread ranking currently in use. Instead of just sorting all threads by their most recent update time, they could instead be sorted by most recent update date, and a second sort parameter added for thread rank. That way within any one day period five star threads would appear at the top, then 4 star, etc. Muckworthy threads could easily be sorted to the bottom of the daily list.. still there, but less cluttering. Unranked threads could be treated as 5 star threads until ranked, and then sorted into their appropriate position. The hilighting currently used to indicate threads you have or have not read would still tell you which threads have changed since you last saw them. I haven't looked at vbulletin code, but that should be a pretty simple thing to implement just by converting the datetime to a date structure for the sort; you could make it a sliding 24 hour window as well to avoid odd thread cuts at midnight, but that might make things more confusing.
I don't know if thread ratings are reliable enough, currently, for this to work. Also, new threads are unrated by default. Will they show up on top?
No worries, it will naturally work its way down there. Depends on how you set up the sort, but I would put the unrated threads at the top until rated. It might be necessary to tweak the thread rating system, but maybe not. If it worked that way, more people would rate threads, which should improve the overall rating accuracy.
