dcihon wrote:So how would you stop people from posting the same questions over and over again.
Create a culture where members are encouraged to search for information rather than taking the lazy way out and just asking with the expectation of being spoon fed.
That takes a long time and needs support from both members and Moderators who view and treat the forum as an information resource, a library if you will, where information is kept in a single place. A new thread asking a common question may just get a response of a link to a search and then locked. After a while the other members will do the same thing - reply just with a link and then a Mod comes along later and locks the thread or moves the posts to another where the question has been answered.
Another very useful thing is to create a Forum Directory - a thread (stickied or linked in the forum header) listing all the common questions and links to the threads that cover those. Call it an Index if you like.
Limitation of the ability for new members to create new threads until they have a few posts already. Alternately, require the first few thread creations by new members to be approved by a Moderator (this creates a lot of work for the Mods), or better, a warning when a new member creates a thread that they should search first. This does work, to a degree, but the lazy ones just ignore it anyway.
There are some forums where asking a question commonly asked and answered will earn you an instant banning. This is, IMHO, a bit extreme, but the message does get through and new members are warned, repeatedly, of the consequences. If they really want to be part of the forum then they will comply.
If it's all done the right way then these measures do work. I'm involved with another forum of similar size to this one. It has 536431 posts compared to FDN's 606760, but only 17231 topics compared to 89595 here. Threads tend to be much longer but finding stuff is just so much easier, even with the limitations of the phpBB forum software. There are fewer members there but a much higher percentage of those are active because they value the forum not just as an information resource but as a community. We found that forum activity dropped somewhat as social media, particularly Facebook, grew, but the Groundhog Day nature of Facebook meant that members have come back, appreciating the more permanent nature of the forum format.