How long is too long for a thread ?

[jesterspet]

I have noticed that some threads such as this one are just too long.

I try to read about something as much as possible before asking a question, especially if there is a thread on what I am looking for. And I try not to post redundant questions in a topic. However in the case of ATI radeon Sticky & other similarly long threads, reading 30+ pages of postings is just too much to ask someone to do.

If you need to reference something in one of these threads, You either have to give the URL + page number and approximate location in the list on the page (if you can find it), or paraphrase the posting and hope you get the details correct.

Personally, I think anything over 10 pages should be allowed to have a "duplicate" thread created ( or a split or something) to continue the discussion and keep the readability of the forum reasonable.
_________________
(X) Yes! I am a brain damaged lemur on crack, and would like to buy your software package for $499.95

[slartibartfasz]

i agree with you that it is hard to extract the one thing you are looking for from a 10p+ thread, but i dont think that it makes much sense to split them. for many people participating in such a thread, it is sort of a slow chat on a topic and i dont believe that the inconvenience of others justifies the inconvenience a split would be for these people.

i would be better imho to implement a page search for threads with more that 10 pages - so that the search not only gives the thread but also the page as a result. but thinking of the implementation problems and the recent problems with server load, this probably wont happen soon.

another thing i could imagine is a forum-netiquette to encourage people to maintain a summary of the thread in the first posting as soon as it gets too long. this works very good in the documentation, tips and tricks forum.
_________________
To an engineer the glass is neither half full, nor half empty - it is just twice as big as it needs to be.