With a REALLY muddled long thread, even doing it John's suggested way (which is obviously the best way to do it) can be rather long and tedious. You have to seriously want to read the whole thread to bother.

Frinstance, when someone wondered on a thread fairly recently how Rick Fielding would have dealt with Martin Gibson, someone else linked to a thread about Pete Seeger, where he actually had done just that, in his own calm way. I had never read that thread before, and when I found it, it was a real mess - one of the more muddled ones. But I really wanted to follow the sequence of posts in the right order to see how the conversation developed. So I kept referring back to the list of posts, jumping round till I had finally read it all.

It was worth it for me that time, but it did take a while, and for most threads I wouldn't bother. Interestingly enough, Naemanson's current Guam thread doesn't seem to be very badly affected - only a few posts out of place.

It's just as well I've read the MOAB since the beginning! On the other hand, with that one, maybe it doesn't matter all that much :-)

John, I think your idea for a game has great potential - might take the place of the thread name game even! Infinite number of monkeys - ha ha.