I hope it's not stating the obvious to say there's often a gap between the interests of participants, and the interests of people looking to get information fro

I hope it's not stating the obvious to say there's often a gap between the interests of participants, and the interests of people looking to get information from threads later on. I've found that forum moderation sometimes fragments a forum audience across "boards" to no helpful organisational end. This reduces the value of forums for the casual conversation and debate uses (as opposed to retrieval of information later on). Separately: For the participants, I think threads that discuss issue x for the hundred-and-first time are more often wanted than they are unwanted, because repetition of casual conversations is not a problem. This is despite the fact that participants often complain about such threads. The silent majority of readers presumably have a different view on it.