I do hope we are free to speak openly in this forum, especially since my first suggestion is along these lines, at least for the forum where I spend 99.9% of my FT time. Granted, I wouldn't say "terrible", nor would I liken the moderation to North Korea. I'm thankful for the volunteer work that the mods do ^

That said, I'm not sure that I've ever had a "provocative" post, and with only ~750 posts over 15 years - I tend to only post when I feel strongly about an issue or have something constructive to add to the conversation. Yet, I'm surprised by how many times that my posts disappear shortly after posting with no explanation, while scores of contentious, unnecessary, or non-sensical posts live on. I also have seen an uptick at what is, IMO, over zealous merging of threads - often there is some very timely information that I know needs to be merged eventually, but warrants a day or two on their own to get the info out vice being immediately buried. And lastly on the topic of moderation, while I appreciate the efforts to maintain topic-focus and decorum (usually stemming from a small set of well known perennial agitators - who's posts and threads I happily ignore), I have seen the amount of leash given shrunken to a near choke hold. So, I guess I'm saying that in most cases, I wouldn't mind a little bit more leeway given rather than shutting down discussion or removing tangential, but related information.

I understand the need for a no cross-posting rule, but I wish threads contained a "possible related threads" reference list that we could post links to, i.e., we post in the most relevant thread, but add a link to this thread in another thread's reference list if we feel the info is relevant there as well. In theory the search tool should make this unnecessary, but I never have good results with the search tool - especially if I don't know just the right keywords. The reference list could function similar to a wiki - only viewable if opened.

Another suggestion is to require new users (e.g., less than 20? posts) perform a search (or searches) prior to starting a thread. (I just noticed an earlier suggestion to require moderator review before starting a new thread by a new user - I think this is an EXCELLENT idea)