comment thread numbering breaks sorting in Drupal.

The phpbb2drupal_comment_save function builds thread IDs in a dangerous way:

        // Next, we increase this value by one.  Note that we can't
        // use 1, 2, 3, ... 9, 10, 11 because we order by string and
        // 10 would be right after 1.  We use 1, 2, 3, ..., 9, 91,
        // 92, 93, ... instead.  Ugly but fast.

It's ugly in more ways than just looks.

The resulting forum cannot sort comments added to ported-over nodes properly. Here's the behavior:

A sample post has the following comment IDs generated by the module at transfer time:

1/
2/
3/
4/
5/
6/
7/
8/
9/
90/
91/
92/
93/
94/
95/
96/
97/
98/
99/
990/

I go to the post, hit reply on the post (not a comment below it), and that comment gets this ID:

191/

Of course in the string sort this lands between /1 and /2, the first two comments of the post. The comment module doesn't understand the numbering scheme. So much so that adding a second comment to the post gives it the SAME thread ID again, further mucking up sorting.

This module needs to be changed to either do it the slow and correct way and/or use the internal mechanism for adding comments. I've just diagnosed this problem on my own site and am going to cook up a custom script to reset comment thread IDs and then test it out before I take the time to troubleshoot this fiasco in the module.

How much slower would it have been to pad the number to become a 4-digit number with leading zeroes, and just increment that? The phpBB forum does not allow posts from posts the way Drupal allows comments on comments. It just allows posts on topics, so you should never really have to deal with dots in thread IDs when importing.