For what it’s worth, and since I “complained” about the stickies, I have to say I like the current system, and think Peter does a very good job in splitting / merging threads. There might be a better system that I don’t think of, but I don’t feel there needs to be a change.
The only issue that I have is with split threads, that you lose the information about which posts you have already read. So after a thread has been split, when you only come back a few days after it happens, you will have to do a cursory read through the whole thread again until you get to the point where the posts start feeling new again. If the information about posts that were marked “read” could be conserved, that would be great. But when even post numbering is an issue, I can see how this would be a lot of effort to implement.
The issue seems to be with preserving links (both live links, and post numbers mentioned in text) to posts, even though the post is later moved into another thread. Otherwise, one could just renumber the destination thread whole, after each merge.
Sure there must be solutions, but not anything easy.
However, when threads are merged, it would be very rare to get unread posts anywhere near the end of the destination thread. What I mean is that the typical merge scenario is merging one thread from 2013 with another one from 2016/17 (and ending today, 30th January 2017). So a typical regular reader only needs to go to the end of the thread. Of course he/she probably doesn’t remember those 2013 posts but one can’t do anything about that 
and often old posts like that do kick off a new and really good discussion.
In any situation I can choose between merging the 2013 thread into the 2016 thread, or merging the 2016 thread into the 2013 thread. It achieves the same result when you scroll it and read it, but the post numbering, and maybe other stuff, ends up differently. I normally merge a short thread into a long one because it is much less work for me, however.
Finally, I merge very few threads. We just get some repeating ones and the 8.33 and ELT ones are the biggest examples.
I have tons of work to do and don’t want any more Just spent several hours ordering parts for the Annual and the engine swap, and making sure the right bits come back fitted to the engine…
Mind you, my comment was about split threads, not merged ones.
I think the issues are the same because when I split a thread I also use the Move Post function, with multiple posts selected, and I have two options:
Splitting a thread is desirable where it has gone off- topic but the OT posts are valuable.
Obviously, one person’s “valuable” may not be another person’s “valuable”, so I have to use my judgement there. Lately, we have had a lot of good stuff generated in this way. But that wasn’t always the case at times past…
I don’t think it’s the threads getting too long as such, but the flat thread format becomes an issue as a thread gets long.
So many web boards (EuroGA included) have forgotten decades of Usenet user interface experience, unfortunately no web board manages the usability that trn had in 1991 – or even Microsoft Outlook Express’s usenet reader! Reddit gets close with its thread presentation (it actually gives a tree view of threads), but has a lot of other usability issues.
Having a tree view of a thread, so you can see the ‘sub threads’ as it were rather than having to guess at which post in a thread the latest post is actually in a reply to would go a long way to improving thread reading (for one, it allows you to ignore part of the thread you’re not interested in while continuing with parts of the thread you are interesting – e.g. doing a ‘mark all read’ on a branch which has just become an exercise in pedantry).
A long time ago I wrote a web board (long before it was possible to do HTML 5 stuff that would make implementing a decent “Usenet-like” user interface), and precisely because of these kinds of limitations, it had an NNTP server so users who preferred a newsreader could use that instead. These days we could do much better with the web front end because of level of javascript support that’s available and decent frameworks.
Finners wrote:
I wonder if some wikis might be the solution?
I think this is a good point. I don’t know if it’s a solution, but the point is of importance. This is a discussion board first and foremost. As such, the layout etc works just fine, almost perfect. By merging to monster threads, the discussion part sort of disappears, and it becomes a wiki, but a poor one.
So many web boards (EuroGA included) have forgotten decades of Usenet user interface experience, unfortunately no web board manages the usability that trn had in 1991 – or even Microsoft Outlook Express’s usenet reader! Reddit gets close with its thread presentation (it actually gives a tree view of threads), but has a lot of other usability issues.
Well, yes, and I “grew up” on Usenet too, and I still use the Agent reader (and have been using it for email since 1995 – runs great on win7-64 and by not displaying HTML emails has none of the various vulnerabilities to 3rd party links etc ) but the cold reality is that some 99% of usenet readers deserted Usenet for web-based forums as soon as they got half a chance, many years ago. We can have a moan about this, and carry on about e.g. Tinder undermining relationships 
but the world has moved on.
And Reddit is really horrible, and – like Facebook forums etc – useless for creating a useful resource.
Nowadays you have to present a really simplified user interface otherwise almost everybody will switch off.
It also has to work on various mobile devices, and it has to look ok on phones, tablets, and PCs, and all of these need a different presentation.
You can provide a simplified user interface, and one that also includes things that makes longer threads actually make sense, such as a thread tree view. I did that for mine. It had a “a huge long list” (like EuroGA.org) format, and with a simple click of a button you could show a tree view and it would be remembered in the user profile. Most people preferred a tree view because it made threads a lot easier to follow, even though being the Web 1.0 days it was pretty limited.
People didn’t leave Usenet for web based forums as soon as they had the chance, rather, newer users started using forums because they are more discoverable, so most of the traffic ended up there so many people were forced to leave for web forums, despite their inferior user interface, inferior scalability, and inferior resilience.
Well, I agree, but the way I would have phrased it would be: “the 5% of posters who contributed 95% of the good information stayed, and they would have been happy with a user interface designed by my childhood hero, but the newcomers dried up, and since the 5% is a moving group, the postings soon dried up too”
