Having been part of many forums over the past 10+ years, and having been a moderator of a local heavy traffic motorcycle forum with 20k+ members, I must say this is a great reminder thread.
Yes, the beauty of online forums is that information stays available and accessible through search functions, and discussions can be brought back to life at a later date (be it a week, month or years later.) In fact, at work, we are now looking at exploiting forum format discussions to replace emails with, as emails only go to certain individuals and groups, and new members of those teams and/or new employees won't have access to that already discussed information. So yes, the search function is good, and it helps a lot.
But...
The life of every forum is its new members... seriously, old timers of the forum have seen it and been there/done that all, and if there were no new members joining in, the forum would soon turn into a deserted island with a few people starting unrelated threads here and there just to keep things going.
New members may bring up the same old questions, but the same old questions asked again and now, can and usually do bring other related discussions and topics into the discussion, with new contributions from others (also new to the forum) who may have found a better way of doing a mod or a fix or ...
I still find myself answering questions on the other forum that I have answered many times before... but almost in each case, I find new information shared by others that added value to the discussion. I usually do a quick search here and there, and provide the search results to the person asking the question. Sometimes new people don't even know what terminology to use and what word they should do a search on!
And if I find myself totally burnt out by the 'stupid' questions that are being asked over and over again, I simply skip those threads, and leave it up to others to go chime in. It is better than my going in and posting a rude or pissed off sounding post.
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