I love that the mods are taking a more active interest in the site and keeping things friendly, but recently every time I search for anything in the forum it leads me to a topic that Peter has closed or merged and makes finding related information really frustrating. It may be more of a symptom of users reposting threads but it seems a bit much. Moving genuine questions about specific things to the thread dedicated to general discussion just serves to make finding information difficult. No disrespect, all love just my two cents,
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if you spent a fair bit of your day pointing people to multiple existing threads youād understand why it was advantageous to merge ā¦ I do think merging and managing thread size are things to be balanced against one another wrt the effectiveness of future searches ā¦ Iām not agreeing nor disagreeing but if the thread count grew too high it would be a worse situation than we have now ā¦ the other thing is about a bit of respect for those who have already answered queries, if thereās no culture to encourage searching it ends up that people who feel obliged will answer the same query lots of times ā¦ Iāve lost track of the number of basic CV related queries Iāve tackled e.g.
@PeterHanes knows the forum content better than anyone, so the price to pay for such meticulous overseeing is that it will be tidied up
Iām not sure what has specifically caught your eye but I have only noticed one AH query which I personally thought could have retained its own thread ā¦ I recall thinking the question had been tackled but it was buried in a rather large catchall thread ā¦ this level of tidying requires attentiveness and a complete overview of the content and Peter reads everything 
I for one appreciate Peterās input/curation and I mostly concur (though sorting through old threads is not something iād encourage 
)
just my 2 cents
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I would tend to agree. It seems like any content related to the Heat is being merged into the single topic āAnalog Heatā but maybe Iām being unfair and they are merging things when questions are being duplicated, in which case itās fair enough.
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@nedavine I think that the problem lies on the fact that your searches bring you on a topic with no information anymore.
This is the root of the pb.
The merging is precisely made to avoid the scattering of the informationā¦
Now what you point out may be something we should investigate : it would seem merged topics are still listed, while they shouldnāt IMO.
Thank you for pointing this out anyway, buddy.
BTW : do you have some example of searches that would put us on the good lead ?
EDIT2 : OK, I found an example. Investigation in progress 
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Sorry, didnāt mean to step on anyoneās toes. Definitely the heat is a key issue. But even old threads of mine that were general questions but about my specific case got merged into mega threads. I understand that it can be frustrating to see the same questions come up . But I kinda feel itās better to encourage the community to answer people than to just shut people down and say ālook it upā. Otherwise it feels like a wiki rather than a discussion forum. Mega threads suffer just as much from repetition. Maybe even more so as with a mega thread I canāt ignore the questions as easily as a post about it that I simply donāt click on. Obviously itās all subjective though and the balance is up to you guys. But heat has definitely been over compressed and trying to pick specific stuff out of mega threads is rather difficult.
Again, sorry for moaning. It really is rather subjective. 
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FWIW, I agree with this assessment. Iāve been here long enough to know that both Peter and avantronica (and other mods?) have nothing but the best of intentions for this forum and I know thereās sound reasoning to the thread merging/closing. But it does seem like weāre now stuck with a few mega-threads (heat one is best example) and I think some new users may get the vibe that theyāre being shut down by this practice. Maybe thatās not altogether a bad thing in that it weeds a few bad apples out and keeps the place slimmed down? Dunno. But yeah, in particular re: the heat - especially as Iām gassing for one and will pull the trigger the second itās OB-ready - I find myself wishing there were WAY more threads so that conversation could sort of organically go in its natural tangents and in doing so, Iād have more to read about it.
In short, youāre not the only one whoās had this thought.
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Thanks for the thoughts, everyone. As noted, there are pros and cons to thread splitting and merging, and we are trying to find the best practice for overall readability. Everyone has their own way of using the forum.
We do take everyoneās views into account and we will look at our policies and practices. Although the forum software is much better than the previous version, there are some quirks and I need to look at those before we do much more merging.
The big Analog Heat topic was created and shaped initially by HQ (the announcement was a complete surprise to us humble moderators) but the AH now has its own category for people to post on different aspects of it.
Finally, hereās a reminder of the relevant section of the guidance in the FAQ:
Keep It Tidy
Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:
Donāt start a topic in the wrong category.
Donāt cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
Donāt post no-content replies.
Donāt divert a topic by changing it midstream.
Donāt sign your posts ā every post has your profile information attached to it.
Rather than posting ā+1ā or āAgreedā, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.
https://www.elektronauts.com/faq
Please keep posting your views and we will see what arises.
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The example I found was a duplicate question about using Heat as a sound card.
In such case, merging with the right topic is a good step, obviously.
Now indeed mega threads are far from ideal to extract information.
You rose a relevant subject, @nedavine : thx for your feedback.
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