> That doesn't actually answer my question, it just makes me want to repeat it: if you have that attitude, why be there at all? The existence of a forum instead of an IRC chat or some other immediately-forgotten medium means that someone considers the discussion worth preserving.

At first I thought the complaint was that long threads can have numerous irrelevant fluff posts, outdated posts, and off-topic posts getting in the way of reading the useful bits. But treating a forum thread as a live conversation was somewhat surprising to me. And specifically excluding that a thread could be reference material perhaps reflects a difference between the sorts of places GP and I prefer to browse.

But about long threads: stepping through a 30-page or 300-page thread, where rarely is a post an update about the project, while the rest add nothing substantial, discourages looking through the whole the whole thread is not always practical. And search often doesn't return anything useful.