@digittante, i do believe you're right in your need to make the helpful threads more visible, and I think that the "Active Topics" sidebar would help that a lot except for one thing. The negative (and often repeat) topics tend to be the highly active ones, so you get an abnormal amount of negative threads there. the helpful threads get a few responses until a particular problem is solved, and then that's it.

It's not really a problem for the helpful topics, as they do what they need to do, the problem is the negative threads where everyone feels the need to respond, even if it is to say "quit the whining". That keeps the thread active and so it overrides the helpful threads. Afraid I've got no real solution for that kind of thing though, that would require a measure of tolerance and the ability to ignore so called "whining" threads that seems to be lacking.