I'm not quite sure I'm following your thoughts, or that you are following mine[]/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]. It's not necessarily an end user enhancement. It's basically a database enhancement. Yes, I am speaking of postlist.pl/php. Before this was added, every call to postlist had to query the database for all threads in that forum. For example, this forum here. There are 307 threads. So, every time you bring up the post listing screen for this thread it counts all 307 threads and does calculations on those numbers. By adding the active threads toggle, it only grabs a portion of them.
I guess it's kind of hard to explain. If you want all threads to be shown then you can set the default to show all. And it will behave just like you are used to. But for those that are concerned about speed issues on the server it really is beneficial to set this to something lower as the SQL server has much less to process.
