META: Thread Consolidation

First, I made a similar post on the MGoBoard FAQ thread, but it doesn't seem like it got any eyes on it there, so I thought I'd create a thread for it and try to expand upon my points a bit.  Whether everyone is going to think this relevant or the best time to bring this up, I thought it might be a nice change of pace to discuss board improvements in light of yesterday's events.  Also, while I don't have many points.

I think this has sort of been in the air for a while, but I thought it might be helpful if there was a push to start consolidating threads.  I've noticed a lot of aggravation this week about the creation of new topics which are very similar to ones that have already been started.  In the last few days I have noticed new topics every time someone has a prediction for the UM/MSU game and we've had four or five topics about the #1 jersey that have been extremely similar.

If there was some sort of concerted effort by the mods and the regular posters to try and encourage posters to simply add replies to already existing threads, I think it would lower the stress-level around here a bit and make the board a bit easier to navigate as a whole.  I'm not sure how much good it would do to add something onto the FAQ about adding to similar threads rather than creating new ones, but I figure it couldn't hurt.

I suppose this idea is really just an expansion of the current policy of policing threads about topics which have already been discussed.  But, instead of having eight different threads about MSM predictions, the first person would just create a thread for general MSM predictions.  This would be especially useful for topics that this happens to regularly (like, I would assume the aforementioned predictions).  Whether or not this will do any good, as the effectiveness of the current redundant post policy is debateable, but I'd like to hear others ideas about it.

Finally, another issue that I think is in the same vein (but I know has already been brought up ad nauseum) I would like to see the broad split into some sub-boards (perhaps one for on-topic, one for off-topic, but sports related, and one for completely off-topic).  I'm not sure how feasible this would be  from a  technical standpoint or if Brian would even want to expand the board that way, but I think it would reduce a lot of the complaining about irrelevant topics.