Re: First poster / thread started by…
On this forum “Started 5 hours ago by jabberwock” appears. So, there are functions to do what you want to do. Maybe it’s just not in the theme you’re using. This is in my topic.php:
<li><?php printf(__('Started %1$s ago by %2$s'), get_topic_start_time(), get_topic_author()) ?></li>
Those are your functions. The get_topic_start_time returns a time elapsed sort of thing (i.e. “5 days ago”) rather than a date. There is probably a function to return the topic start date instead of time elapsed as well. Maybe it’s topic_time or get_topic_time or topic_start_time. All the functions are pretty reasonably named.