I don't see what the problem is with what we have now...its pretty democratic this way, with relevant news that has a lot of member interest staying near the top of the page, while news items that are not interesting (or there isn't much to say about them) fall quickly, insuring that the front page always has either interesting or new topics.
A few simple suggestions:
1. Don't delete threads - I agree w/ Pana, it's nice to have the history, and it keeps members accountable for what they say.
2. Lock redundant threads. (But not delete).
One problem I do see (and I have no idea how to fix), is that in any CELL-related thread, both sides always repeat themselves OVER and OVER again...the discussion never goes anywhere, just runs in circles. I don't think making a Official CELL thread helps, because by the time we're on page 30, page 10 has been forgotten.
One thing that could help is to break up the overall CELL discussion into several topical threads - transistor count, heat, launch date, process technology, etc etc... However, given how all these things are interconnected, this would be of limited use at best.
The situation I would like to avoid is one where one side's argument on a certain topic is utterly destroyed, only to have that side switch to some other topic without any resolution to the first subject. I'm obviously biased in this regard, but IMHO
this thread is a prime example of this kind of behavior. Without some kind of "ok, we can agree on this" we never get anywhere, and argue about the same stuff again and again. By having threads specifically for a certain topic, maybe we can avoid this kind of topic-switching.
