mwalsh said:
And I think that thread is the one that's going to keep Nissan's attention, since they started it!
While this seems like a good point, I'd say overall that sometimes I am not sure what is the right criteria for starting a thread. Often I will see a fresh take on an old topic and be inclined to start a thread. If it's a topic that I know exists, but which I think is obscured by the number of pages in that thread, I will sometimes go ahead anyway. After all, one could argue that we oughtn't have more than one single thread ever, and all topics are subsumed within that. I think it sometimes seems useful to jump-start a topic once in awhile by starting a fresh thread to bring some attention to it.
The admonitions that usually arise, whether from the moderator or fellow users often are not accompanied by a helpful link, but they usually fall into two categories -
- The assumption that one didn't make a decent effort at searching the forum first. With maybe a couple of exceptions, this assumption has always been wrong, in my case. Often the response will not provide a link and I question if sometimes further useful discussion of the topic doesn't take place because of the nip-the-new-thread-in-the-bud priority.
- The assumption that the existing thread is perfectly adequate and there should not be a new thread. I guess that's kind of an age-old judgment call, but for a thread with dozens or hundreds of pages, I'm often somewhat tempted to start a new thread, to bring attention to my point.
Anyway, all of this may seem very after-the-fact in this thread, but when I come to the forum it is often with a new-to-me topic in mind and so this judgment-call stuff begins anew.