On Sat, 11 Oct 2014 18:33:21 +0000 (UTC), "Danny D."
wrote:

My habits are to read the top 10 or 20 threads (whatever fits on one
screen), so, I wouldn't see a thread that is old, by a few weeks.

On the other hand, there's a thread about the treehouse in the redwoods
which will likely take months, as each stage has multiple questions for
improvement.

Is it better to post each separate question, and then each thread goes to
the top? Or, better to re-use the old thread?

Would you even *see* posts in an old thread? (I wouldn't.)

I certainly see your problem. I have the same one. For example, if
someone re-uses a subject line, like "AC problem" it sorts with the
earliert post with the same subject, and I probably don't see it. I
subscribed to one NG for years, forgetting that it posted a monthly FAQ,
with important details, because every month it had the same subject name
and sorted way up (in your case down) at the beginning of my posts. So
I never saw them after the first month.

(On most groups I have the expiration date set for 10 years, and may
increase it when the 10 years gets close.

(This group is so busy that I was having technical problem when I kept
all my posts so I had to lower it to 85 days, I think. (Well checking,
I see that I didn't do this for the new computer, and I haven't had any
problem, so I have about 38,000 headers going back to march of 2011,
although I haven't retrieved bodies for 13,000 of them and it's too late
to retrieve all but the more recent bodies now. )

In one group, I sort so they show up in the order they were retrieved,
no threading. This makes it easier to see every post, but I don't read
them by thread, and that's not as good. When I get mixed up, i
highlight the post in question and change the sort to "by thread" and
then I can see the context. Forte Agent is good at quickly resorting,
even old versions.

It sorts by author too, although I've rarely used that, and even by
length of post. The last one helped only once or twice when I was
searching for a post that was very short or very long.