Yeah, it’s not really judgement, it’s actual experience. In the nearly two months since the switch to Discourse, I have lost track of a few conversations because they split. Most of those were from moderators splitting a topic, but at least one was from someone experimenting with the reply as new topic option.*
As for the issue of community-created topics getting lost in the firehose of BB-created topics, I still think the best solution for that would be to swap the latest and Categories views, so that http://bbs.boingboing.net/ shows the categories view and http://bbs.boingboing.net/latest has to be explicitly visited. In the current setup, creating new topics only adds to the firehose, making any particular community topic even less likely to be seen.
*Which reminds me, is there a way to see a list of all the topics I am currently tracking?
