A proposal: a sticky or pinned post with links to such threads, acting as a form of index to make them easier to find.
The problem we have found with sticky threads is that once you have more than half a dozen they then obscure any recent activity in that section.
.if all threads are safe indefinitely then that is fine
I can categorically state that all threads like this are safe - we have not and will not delete these threads. Obviously I cannot state all threads are safe because if someone starts a libellous thread then I would have no option but to delete it. However in terms of disk space on our hosting package we are currently running about 30% of capacity so have no need to delete any of these valuable threads. I appreciate the time and effort people have made in contributing to the forum and these have made the forum the valuable resource that it is and it would be sacrilege to delete them.
I've often wondered if it would be able to create an index for the forum, but in a way that would be 'open source'.
It is something I have been wrestling with this year. There is an incredible wealth of material on the forum but it can get lost. There is an optional extra for the software known as the resource manager, see
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/ for an example how it works. This allows for users to create and categorise resources. We would be able to create a resource from a thread and the subsequent discussion is attached. The categorisation I think would be useful as it allows people to quickly filter on a topic. However I had a few reservations about it, trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. The resource manager being geared towards a "resource" in terms of forum software it works well because they are dealing with specific plugins, or documents. I experimented with it on a development area but I felt it just didn't work for our needs. It started to separate threads from resources and discussions on resources seem to be a poor mans cousin to the main forum.
They have just released an
update to the forum software which has a number of interesting and useful improvements, one of
which is thread tagging. I'm still not sure if this will give us the forum indexing required but it seem like a step in the right direction. We would then be able to apply tags to reference threads like this which then may make it easier for users to filter and find these threads. I'm testing the update on the development area at the moment and if it doesn't show any problems then I'll look at updating the forum to this version of the software.
Any suggestions or comments on anything I've said is more than welcome. I'm trying to guess what's useful for the members and how they are using the forum. I'd like to think that I've got a reasonable idea of what people are comfortable with but more than happy to be corrected.