Horses for courses..

Forum threads are generally designed for constant stream of free flow chats. I don't see how putting artificial limits will help in making it easier to find the 'goodies' inside a long thread. All it would do (I think) is to spread long threads to 500-posts chunks.

"Oh, I think we talked about that point in 'Gargantuan thread II or III.' ... 'or maybe IV'. Look it up."

If there are important bits that should be distilled from said thread, then it's best to be extracted and saved elsewhere (Wiki, bugtrack, etc).

Of course a better search mechanism is needed too, in case of TMO For the time being, using site:talk.maemo.org on google works quite ok.

Edit: Actually, if we make use of the number of thanks as a search (sorting) parameter; we may be able to easily display the more interesting/useful posts from an overactive thread.