Idiot moderator reporting for duty

Not sure if you have ventured out of General Talk but you should know that this is done for various topics and not only for threads started about english TV series. Eg. various game threads are merged and particular type of phone etc. One reason is that we don't have the best of search engines installed at the moment and its hard to find content across multiple threads, whereas searching within a single thread is most likely to yield better results.
The other reason here is that being TE, I don't really see the point of multiple new threads showing up in new posts about various TV series each having 3-4 posts each since its not a core forum topic. If its really warranted and becomes popular dedicated threads can be created.
In technical sections (say buying advice) content is often duplicated but we let it slide since its part of what TE is. Grouping threads in GT is just a small part of trying to keep the forum slightly focussed on tech.
I think its a bit too much to ask for someone who logs in for a couple of hours to moderate the forums to go around sending dozens of PM's as well for each and everything that is done. To make it easier on the member though, we have a few stickys floating around for most topics letting people know the norms.
Anyway a forum overhaul is up and should be up soon where the users get notificed automatically by the system when a mod takes an action on their threads.