Bitcoin Forum

at what point will people use the search feature instead of making new posts on the same subject. imo, the forum should find someone and hire them to do one thing: merge posts on the same subject. most bigtime forums, especially sports and politics forums have a moderator in charge of merging similar/identical topics.

There is no way to merge threads w/ the current forum software AFAIK... it's a feature I've wanted many times. :P

And me.

iirc correctly, it was merged into smf 2.0. its in the admin console somewhere, to enable splitting topics/merging threads. its fairly simple to upgrade from smf 1 to smf 2, then you can upgrade straight to 2.0.5 with ease

Splitting posts
http://docs.simplemachines.org/index.php?topic=67.0
Merging posts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPye7pJuPhs

Not that easy to upgrade after all the custom coding theymos has done.

i see nothing of significance other than a failing trust system

I guess it was intentionally disabled as it creates offtopic posts where none existed otherwise.

The reasons I want it is because I've fat-fingered a split once or twice and have no easy way to fix it and because sometimes there is a _single_ new post which was purely redundant to another thread and could have just been in that thread.

... though on consideration, usually that latter case the post itself is redundant in that thread too.

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it wasn't done.

Topics can be merged, but theymos doesn't want it done, so he disabled it. It's still enabled in the newbie forum for some reason, I've merged a few topics there in the past.

I understand the need, which would be:
Read some dense posts about the very topic you were looking for.

I don't understand the suggestion, which would end up in:
Read billions of useless posts before you find someone asking the same question as you.