I believe the complaints about the threadnought aren't completely unfounded and, after some thought, I think I should give a rational idea to try to help streamline things. I don't believe people who are completely against the threadnought have considered the alternatives fully but I do respect the opinion (even if I'm a sarcastic ass at times).
Two actions we can possibly take to streamline and make the threadnought more accessible:
1) A weekly/biweekly "Whats new in science" would be very useful. I know a couple of folks who are working on it already, hopefully more to come as it reaches maturation. (If any of them are reading this they can feel free to pop in and talk more)
2) A tag system of some variety may be useful. How you'd implement that is limited as A) Most people would need to use it and B) It would help if it was searchable.
Some sample categories could be #Theory, #Finding, #UP, #Barnacle, #UA, #Request, #Thargoids, #Michael Brookes' Beard, #Whatever-else-you-get-the-idea. Even just having these in the title without a way to search them could be *very* useful. Once again, people would have to use them and I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the threadnought to shift a bit to do that. Lets face it, the threadnought is a massive beast and an object at rest will stay at rest.
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Why we shouldn't fragment the threadnought:
There are plenty of other venues and locales for the aforementioned other approaches to research gathering and sharing, honestly, I' don't use them much as I've found the threadnought faster. Reddit and the Canonn website come to mind on that side, I'm sure there are others as I believe Riz posted a very good one. I believe it was called "goo-gile"

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I do think the threadnought needs to stick with the UA/UP/Barnacle mystery as theres plenty to it. Which, we have, though that may be because mods?
I think, as a new player, I'd rather be able to check the front page of one thread than try to follow 8 different threads about 5 different things with 10x the duplicated info and theories. Not to mention if you are searching back you'd get an extra 10 threads that had the same info but burned out after 3 pages.
As an example where I've seen this happen in ED:
Its a nightmare for me to find other things related to weapon/ship mechanics/stats because everything is so fragmented. There are some good posts but for the most part there's a lot of useless noise. Most people I know that follow it have to collate the info themselves and have to hope its up to date (or run off of memory). A very similar thing would happen with science without the threadnought.
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To sum up:
At the end of the day that front page works nice, it isn't a perfect format but its made within the limits of the forum remarkably well. There's other venues for people who don't want to deal with it as well. To each their own, if you don't like it, that's fine. Go elsewhere for the info, it will be there

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All that said if we could streamline it some it would help accessibility. It isn't unreasonable to try but, thinking about it from a one player standpoint, is a daunting task. If there was a way to coordinate the changes I mentioned (or others) I think it would help quite a bit. Just some food for thought, I doubt it would make everyone happy but it might be more new user friendly.