I was going to post a new thread on this, but I'm glad Oculog broke the ice for me.

This gets complicated, so I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and offer whatever help is necessary.

Right now, I'd call search useless. Well, not useless, but not NEARLY useful enough. Lots of threads have gotten unwieldy, lots of noise gets turned up (someone asks the same question as a previous user, gets told to go search) instead of answers, and in general I've got to spend a lot of time manually parsing text. The mplayer threads were the best example of this.

Let's take all of those redundant questions and give a set of users power to, only after answering the question, move it to a separate forum that doesn't get searched by default. Everyone wins: redundant threads get zapped, newbies don't get discouraged, etc.

One of the biggest search issues, at least for me, is long threads. Let's give this set of users the power to close and redirect (split bluetooth audio into A2DP and Headset, for example) threads that are going too far OT, or even better, split existing threads into "Announce" and "Discussion" threads, or "Troubleshooting" and "Tips" threads. Search seems to work best when the subjects are specific and the number of replies per thread is low.

I'd love to see a way to add table of content links to threads: links like "page 7, post 3: where to find RC2 and how to install it" "page 8, post 8: how to install RC2 on 2007HE" would be insanely useful.