the noobs talk and asking questions here on the pools thread is why we need a slushs forum rather then trawl through 5000 pages on bitcoin talk.
then the chat could be subdivided out and handled in a general forum system while important things could be moved and modererated by a few chosen
+1. There are tons of free forum plugins /standalone systems out there. Phorum for php comes to mind. 380 pages of posts is daunting and most of it usually irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is generally the last 3 or 4 pages. Telling someone to wade through 380 pages of "Is the forum down?" to answer their question seems a bit harsh.