OK, OK,
I know this has been raised a number of times, and leaving the semantic argument aside, for just one moment, I seem to recall that a solid practical argument was raised against this: it uses up more resources to display the total! - I think the simple answer is for the post total of the parent board to not be recalculated with a new post to Child-Boards, but to be recalculated perhaps once a day, or manually, and for it to just be set as a value, and not a variable until a set time, or an admin clicks recalculate totals. I know that this is not a perfect solution, but the reality is that once a forum gets reasonably busy, no one takes the slightest notice of the change in totals, so it being refreshed only every so often will be fine.
As for the semantic arguments: if a Child-Board is a subset, then its total should be added to the parent board. - Period! If the Child-Board is not considered a subset of the parent-board, then it should not be a Child-Board! I can think of no logical reason for having child-boards that are not a subset, so parent totals should include the child's totals. As things stand, there are some occasions where no posts are allowed to the parent board, and that will show on the forum index as a board with no posts, even though the Child-boards may contain many thousands of posts; that cannot be right.
Creating extra server load to do this might be cutting off our noses somewhat, but I think this is a good compromise, where we get nearly all the functionality, but at virtually no cost.
P.S. I think that "Child-Boards" should be changed to "Sub-Boards", as default. Most people, outside of the coding fraternity, do not instinctively understand what is meant by parent/child boards, but virtually all of them understand what is meant a Sub-Board!
1.1 has this option.
If I understand you correctly - yes. See http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php flagpole corner board for example.
Yep, it appears to be.
Are totals generated dynamically, updating with every post? I seem to recall the objection that it would create extra queries with the present code. That did seem like too high a price.
I'm glad to see it implemented though, however it's done.
Not got the code in front of me but faily sure it's done on the fly updating with each post.