Pappy - I am not sure that they are abandoning threads - look upon this another way - maybe they are scrapping ubb.classic and renaming ubb.threads to make it appear that the two products are merging. Could be wrong, but I personally think this is closer to the truth.
Mind you it was only a month or two ago, that Infopop said 'ubb.threads and ubb.classic are going nowhere' - maybe they felt threatened by a brand new bb software company that has just announced their product, which does include groups, sub-forums etc., and looks like a cross between threads & vb. (the alpha screen shots look very good - maybe Pink Jazz did them )
I think that the ubb.ng will be very good for all threads owners - and having the competition of another forum software, will keep them on their toes, so that their market share is not lost.
It is sad that they will not reconsider sub-forums - but as I have invested two licences, and still have a couple of years to run for updates on one of them, I will stick with the new product, and hopefully hack into it sub-forums.
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at the moment - but expanding all the time....) 
