Well, if it's the mixed content of the news thread that's the issue, it might be possible to split it up into multiple broad topics (like world events, feel-good news stories, science, politics, economy, etc). A little like the chat/rage/joy split of general discussion in CPMC, maybe. I also like the idea of splitting off main-news-thread discussions that DO generate a fair bit of talk, as a retroactive justification for topics that generate enough discussion to be considered 'major' stories worthy of giving more specialized attention.
Splitting after the fact is much much much messier than just making a new thread in the first place. Splitting is an extremely painful operation server-side, and I severely discourage using it unless absolutely necessary. Basically the only time I use splitting is to remove inappropriate or bad posts but not delete them outright.
I also question whether increased activity in Renko's is necessarily a good thing, especially when the main complaint against the many-threads format is that it would increase the amount of meaningless me-too replies that don't actually contribute to or spark much discussion - that could clutter up the thread list in Renko's (possibly discouraging the creation of other, potentially more meaningful threads) and take up more server space/resources. The upside is that it would be easier to find individual stories that interest someone personally, but I'm not sure how important that is for Renko's.
How about we worry about that issue when it actually comes up? As it stands now maybe 1 thread gets made in Renko's a WEEK. Basically the only threads that exist are a thread for the upcoming con, a desktop thread (that has been around for ages and every forum has one), and maybe 1 or 2 threads for the current topic of discussion.
As for server resources, maintaining high reply count threads is much more taxing than creating new threads. All threads have their reply list cached if they're considered an "active" thread. If a thread is inactive it just gets shelved and the cache recreated when necessary. But a megathread never really goes inactive so all of the pages have to be kept in cache. If say, a thread has 10 pages worth of replies, it has to keep all 10 pages cached, even if there's only viewers on the last page. If every news article just had their own thread, then the news articles that are popular or interesting would remain cached, and the ones that aren't would just fall. Sure if someone reads one of the threads that are out of the cache it gets pushed into it again, but the expense of rebuilding a cache on a one or two page thread is much lower than having to maintain a 10 page cache on a thread that gets viewed constantly.
Plus after a couple of days these individual threads would just fall to the wayside and a cache miss or two is far less of a problem than having to maintain a cache for a huge thread that only has maybe 1 or 2 pages really active. And given the low activity of Renkos, even the big threads in there are likely to fall out of the cache, and a cache miss on the current news thread is far more taxing than a cache miss on a small individual news article. This is also why splitting posts after the fact is a bad idea, as it'll have to completely recreate the cache on EVERY PAGE even if I'm just pulling out a post or two.
One good measure for whether many-threads would be appropriate could be how many of the threads on Renko's front page are 'used' regularly. If rather few (say, less than half of the default-size frontpage get replies within several days), then there's one less good argument for keeping news stories to one thread. But since that's not the only reason, it might not be enough on its own.
EDIT: Looking at it, it seems like the current front page probably isn't a good representation with three locked threads within the past two days, so it's tough to judge this offhand - it actually looks like about half have been replied to within maybe four days, with rather old replies only for the last two or three topics on the page. Ambiguous.
I have stats for Renkos, it gets on average 10-20 replies/day (out of 830/day globally), not even 1 new thread a week (out of 11/day globally). Having more threads isn't going to harm it, and if anything should generate more activity. Having a few new threads for each news story isn't going to hurt things. Everyone's terrified of "cluttering" the board when in reality we are nowhere NEAR having that sort of problem. Renko's is by far the least active of any board on this forum. Renko's as it stands now has no purpose. It catches the con threads, maybe a thread or two of legitimate discussion, then the rest of "off-topic discussion" happens in CPMC. I've tried enforcing pushing serious discussion to Renko's but to be honest people keep on posting interesting banter in CPMC, and not in individual threads. What am I going to do? Split posts out of the chatty threads when I think there's an interesting derail?
Face it, Renko's is not having a glutton of activity and splitting the news thread apart isn't going to somehow stifle other posts from happening.
