Agreed John, except for:

"Perhaps the boilerplate (thread header?) could be changed generally to insert a note that "individual posts will appear in proper order in the printer friendly view" on each thread, to assist the new users?"

If you are talking about an automatic thread header and programming work, I think it would be simpler (at least temporaly) just to change the sort order. As far as I can see it should only involve changing one word something like (I don't know the actual field names off hand) "messageID" to read "messagedate". SQL does all the working out how to do the ordering.