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.
Search. That's what it's there for. No one expects you to wade through 380 pages. But with 3 clicks most questions can be answered.
Yea, if your search terms are right. And then once you find the question, track down the answer, which may or may not be mixed in with three to five other conversations.
I'm saying, this is not the most efficient way to handle discussion about a range of topics with one central theme. An out of the box forum would do just fine. I'd even volunteer to throw one up if someone has a domain they want to host it on. It's honestly like 5 hours total worth of work to get set up. Moderating, filtering now may be more cumbersome, but Slush's pool is pretty popular. I think it may be time to at least look into a standalone forum.