In the past, as far as I can remember, and I have been here for a long time, 6 years or so, we did ask the moderators to take action over the huge numbers of infiltrators who posting spam, porn and also scammers and they did an excellent job and we have not had any repeats since, this was a few years ago now.
This group does go OT from time to time and as in any situation, you get occasional disagreements between 1 or 2 members and often these are members, who in all honesty Dave, you would call reasonable and sensible normally. When such events happen, or when there is politics or gun talk etc, if these go on for to long or get to be too specific, we have always found that other members give gentle nudges and those involved heed their peers and normality returns.
This has in my view become a problem where the moderators have had to step in and take some form of action has really been far more noticeable since the thread grew in size and somebody decided to make it a sticky. Also, since Dave has mentioned the thread a few times in his video blog, we are finding many new posters and I suspect this a direct result of those two actions. I also suspect that many of those being directed here are expecting this thread to be all encompassing authority on all matters relating to Test Equipment and as such are being disillusioned by the OT chat that has always been part if it, and I dare say that are NOT always finding the answers that are seeking.
The thread was set up by bitseeker in the first instance as a place for other who shared a passion for collecting old bits of test equipment and then trying to repair / restore them and finding themselves addicted to it, maybe problems in their real lives as a result of that addiction and the clue to that is contained within the threads title Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread. Could it be that hardly anybody reads beyond the first 2 words and things thats for me? To my mind it is more like "Alcoholics Anonymous" and how many people would want to be a member of that support system, not many I wager, but billions of people love alcohol.
Yes there is a lot of electronics talk in the thread and mostly anything of note has been catalogued by the OP and is listed on page 1 of the thread, and many of these have also dedicated threads setup under other parts of the forum, such as Repairs, Projects etc to steer people looking for specific repair information to their target. Many people with in this thread are also active within the other threads, such as the Beginners for instance, and actively offer help and support to the young players.
So perhaps the best way to resolve the current turmoil would be to remove the sticky thread and let it return to becoming just another thread under the generic Test Equipment banner were it would become one of the other 482 threads in that section?