I'll weigh in here with my personal opinions.

I don't feel there is so much traffic on this forum that we need to subdivide to such a fine extent in order to confine my reading to just those sections that interest me. Personally, I find the traffic level so low that I can simply read all the posts. So the hierarchy isn't a problem for me.

And as much as I admire Richard (aka Northern Hewer) and his amazing accumulated knowledge, I actually don't like threads that go on forever wandering from topic to topic. I would have preferred to see several threads in the tools form.

Perhaps what you are envisioning is some sort of timber framing encyclopedia, which I am all in favor of, but should be done with wiki technology, not a discussion board. And as far as being able to easily find information on a certain topic, the search feature works for that.

Regarding the archives, as far as I know, the only things in there are posts from the old system which could not be migrated. I don't think current threads ever get pushed down there, do they?

If I'm correct about the archive, and you find a gem down there that you want to resurrect, I don't see why you couldn't start a new thread and then copy and paste in the old posts to start, and then carry on. In other words, perform a by-hand migration of the best topics, since there was no way to do mass migration using a power tool.

Joel, am I correct about the archive? CB.