Reggie :

Here are some dead-serious excerpts from technut's tongue-in-cheek thread in the Off-Topic forum :
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=13481

"Reading the forum today I feel like I'm in a temporal loop. Every 3rd post is a repeat of something already covered. And duplicate threads are multiplying like rabbits.
(...)
Thee seems to be a LOT of people who would rather start their own thread or post their own question, rather than read someone else's thread or read the answer that was previously posted.
I'm kinda hoping the place will implode from everyone posting and nobody reading. Then perhaps those on the periphery will be blown out of orbit and only the solid core will remain."

A lot of us do feel the situation is getting out of hand. Here is what I proposed :

"there's a very simple way (no code required) to AT LEAST make them look for a thread related to their problem/question/latest discovery and append it there instead of creating the Nth duplicate thread of the day... It's commonly used on other boards : just require a minimum "level" (number of posts, membership duration, karma, etc.) before new users are allowed to *create* new threads.
It's not something you do when you're just starting the forum, like Reggie did two years ago, but now that it has reached critical mass and may even be in danger of going ballistic, it could be a good idea..."

What do you think ? Is this an available option in vBulletin ?

At first I backed down, now I think I'm right again... 95% of the stuff is troubleshooting and should go into the Troubleshooting forum. The other 5% is prices for tablets which should go into the Buy/Sell/Deals forum (of course these prices are gone 2 days later so the threads are useless). The other 0% of good content would then be freely visible.

@fpp: New members sign up precisely because they have a problem, so preventing them from creating a new thread might be quite annoying, but I fully agree that we have a serious problem with new members turning up and creating a new thread for their problem without bothering to see if there's already a solution elsewhere or a pre-existing thread discussing the same problem. It never ceases to amaze me how little effort people seem to put in before posting, expecting others to put the effort in for them.

The only solution I see is to merge each new duplicate thread into a pre-existing main thread, but as this may be too much work for Reggie it might be necessary to create moderators for this specific function.

I think the best solution is to create moderators, or just exercise patience. If you don't allow people to start a new thread with their first post, you'll probably prevent some new and interesting discussions from being started.

Something I've seen in other forums is that if someone starts a new thread that covers a topic already being discussed, simply reply to them with a link to the pre-existing thread. That tends to kill off duplicate threads pretty quickly.

Unfortunately the duplicate thread doesn't always die, leading to the same discussion taking place across multiple threads.

I'd quite happily reply "Already being discussed <here>" if it were possible to then close the thread! Which brings us back to moderators... I'd rather not have moderators per se, but the number of vanity threads created over the last few days has made my blood boil (not difficult as I'm already pretty p1ssed at Nokia/Maemo!)

Or, as is more often the case, the torches and pitchforks come out, a lot of mudslinging takes place, and the discussion continues in the duplicate thread anyway.

It would be beneficial (as has been said before) to try and move information from the threads to a wiki. I can understand the difficulties of searching for and then trawling through lots of posts to find an answer to a question (though this doesn't excuse some of the more blatantly already-covered threads that appear).

Yeah, except if you're also a mod you simply close the thread after posting the link to the existing thread. Hopefully this produces the desired behaviour.

I also don't think this is the way forward. What will then happen is that threads are polluted with questions which are unrelated because people couldn't start a new one (whether they should have or not).

I voted on this bug.

I consider it useful to restrict new users to opening new threads in a suitable subset of forums (maybe Newbie and Troubleshooting), to limit the amount of stray off-topic threads. But if they can't open new threads at all, they will drop their questions as responses to often wildly inappropriate threads, which would make matters even worse.

Well, obviously it's not a be-all, end-all system. But the vast majority of threads created lately are worthless and redundant, so it's not like we run the risk of impoverishing the forum contents, quite the opposite.

However, this approach has one overwhelming merit : it's doable (if Reggie decides so), and automatic. All other suggestions rely on volunteer manpower, time & effort (refactoring forum information to the Wiki, moderators merging and closing threads etc. ). They have been suggested many times before and have consistently failed to materialize. I predict they will continue to fail, especially with the current mess.

Moreover, these approaches are not mutually exclusive but complementary : if some authoritarian software throttle like the one I mentioned (or another such) could take care of say 80% of the problem, then a core of dedicated moderators and redactors would stand a chance of coping with the rest.