>why are you using PHP when Wakaba is written in Perl?
Because I know more of PHP. My knowledge of Perl is nonexistent; I've never worked with it before.
>you could be hitting the database hundreds of times for each user that views the page
Fair enough. If this were for a popular imageboard, I wouldn't recommend this method. But in a situation where you only have five posters, this manual method works well. Plus, the table from >>404 is a simplified version of the real masterlist table, which contains multiple elements ('type' and 'description') that can't be automatically generated (as they don't exist outside of the masterlist) so I can't just cycle through the parent threads.
>share my code
Oh, I'd definitely be interested in seeing it if you do fix it. Or just the unfixed code. Curious how other people (who know Perl) tackled this problem.