I'm not gonna cover everything since a lot of it Marc and others have pretty much said what I would, but there's a few things I do want to respond to.
ghijkmnop wrote:My primary complaints that have led me to this (admittedly Scotch-driven) suggestion are:
1. People refer to posts in other threads without linking, expecting the reader (me) to slog through 80 pages to find their relevant post.
2. The search feature in this, and pretty much every other internet forum is terrible.
3. At 15 posts per page, it's too many page loads to get through a thread (which is why I chose 8 as the number of pages where I stop paying attention).
4. I probably should have said "topic has apparently been discussed to completion, because now there are multiple pages of horse puns regarding Ann Coulter and Sarah Jessica Parker" instead of "morphed far away..."
1. I'd say that yeah, this is generally bad forum etiquette. If it's mentioned in passing I don't think it much matters, but for any serious point, you should really link it. That said, I'm not convinced that this would actually solve anything. Borrowing the Trump example from earlier in the thread, I'd expect that people would more often still refer to it as "in the Trump thread" or "one of the Trump threads" instead of "Trump's Racist Policies On Immigration Thread" or whatever. At which point you'd have to slog through however many pages of however many Trump threads to find it, and it's not really any easier, likely more difficult.
And no, I don't expect that most people would be specific about which thread on the topic. Guys, I love this forum, the people on this forum, and the discussions here, but I do not believe that the majority of people here would consistently remember to follow that etiquette, not anymore than they link to their specific posts at least. There's forum etiquette that a lot of people don't follow. I don't even mean anything fancy either. Double posting, which I tend to merge and remove when I see. Specific, meaningful thread titles (that has been a lot better lately). Using youtube=hidden in video heavy threads (I've had to change A LOT of these fairly often). Removing images from quotes (we had to install a mod because so few people actually did this). What I'm saying is, is that people tend to be really bad at following etiquette, and your solution isn't going to help with that. It grinds my gears when people don't, and I also realize I'm more anal about that than most people (I would standardize so many things in life if I could), and I agree that's a problem, but this doesn't actually address it. It just shifts the problem around a bit.
2. I'm not sure how much you've played with advance search, and I'll agree that it's still not that great (sadly), but if you use the options to search by author, certain forum(s), and keywords all together, you get some better results. But that's really more an aside, since extra threads aren't going to fix that issue.
3. Alright, so I personally feel that 15 is a good default number of posts per page. Now, I generally like to load up my pages with more posts per page when I can, just so that I have to load fewer pages. There's almost certainly a way to add an option in the UCP to set the number of posts per page for yourself. I'd have to pester avi to find out the feasibility of that for certain, but there's probably a way. I don't really get how this is going to help with your original complaint at all, but I agree that we should have an option to increase it, and I'd be in favour of adding it, setting 15 as the default.
4. Like I said, some threads just go to hell. I actually agree with you here, I can't remember which thread you're talking about, but after I saw 2 pages of bad puns, I checked out of that thread. It'd run it's useful course by that point.
In regards to catch all threads, I think that's kinda a case-by-case thing. Some cover far too much, and they provide enough content to create multiple different threads worth of discussion. The Social Justice thread went south pretty fast for a lot of reasons, and it should've been locked long before it was. A lot of the things posted there could've and should've been their own thread. Some didn't quite merit it, and the mega-thread worked better. I'm not sure that there's a perfect solution to dealing with that, since having a mega-thread and individual threads would've been a nightmare trying to have everyone posting in the correct one (see again point 1 paragraph 2), and it was a nightmare anyway.
But that's kind of the only mega-thread I can think of that had that problem. Like Marc said, the Trump thread is ongoing, and it's a less broad topic, so it works well how it is. The bizarre thread is mostly comprised of posts that would not do well as a topic, since they'd be threads that'd get maybe 3 replies before dying, if any. The idiots thread is in the same boat as the bizarre in that regard (though I still hate that thread for it's intent).
And I think part of that is not because of an objective correct way that those things should always be handled on any forum. I think some of it is based on the size and culture of the forum. Another catch all thread is The Metal Thread, where we post pretty much any sort of metal music related thing that gets posted to this forum. On a dedicated metal forum, or even just a dedicated music forum with a big enough metalhead userbase, you could conceivably have a thread for each metal band we talk about, each distinct metal news piece, etc. IMDb has the userbase to have dozens, sometimes hundreds of threads, for just a single movie (that said, 99% of what gets posted there is worthless, but that's an aside). We don't have that here, so we have a catch all metal thread, and individual threads for each movie that gets discussed.