@Bri Thanks for the reply. I believe that if you do that with the current flat reply system the conversation would become very confusing. You would need the system to be chronological to preserve the discusssion and then maybe switch to highest vote order after a while. Not sure this would work very nicely. This may be resolvable with nested replies but I was trying to find a simpler solution.
My thought was, if you think about a new user who is trying to find the answer to a question, they will arrive at the forum based on a google search and end up on a particular topic. From there they will try to find the best answer to the question that the chain of replies has to offer. I would like them to be able to do this easily without reordering the posts or trying to decide where the conversation ended, which a new user is unlikely to want to do. I was thinking we could highlight the post in its location in the chronological stream and also place it at the top in a green box, just underneath the original topic post.
I think this is probably not that hard to do. I am in the process of exploring the plugin system to see if this is possible.