Here's an idea I just thought about applying to my own forum. A Wiki type of topic. One that anyone can edit to be used for common knowledge type of topics. Like stickies, these would be prepended with "Wiki", but would only show the original topic when clicked. The full topic would be under a "Click here to discuss this" link of some type.
Issues
Revision history for restoring previous versions
Ability to stop revision wars without locking
Wiki markup processing for copy/paste from other sources
Who is the post attributed to? Member created or admin/mod only?
Maybe this would be better served as a seperate script than trying to modify the topic file, depends on the changes required.
The inspiration for this is a topic on my forum here. It was started because the original topic had grown to over 1,200+ posts and it was becoming impossible to find what you were looking for without looking through all. This would be the perfect situation to apply this to.<

Sounds like a great idea for a mod - have you got a prototype going yet?<

It was a hour old idea, so no. Still thinking through how it's going to work for my forum.
Right now, leaning towards inserting a 0 ID member that would be used for system type functions like this. Snitz really needs a type ID for posts to distinguish different types of posts.<

Well, that wasn't so bad. Got the basic functionality in place. Here's the test topic.
Made a 0 ID locked member in the name of the forum to have the posts appear from. Added a typeid fields to the topics table. Storing all edits in an XML structure in a history field in the topics table. <revision><dt></dt><member_id></member_id><message><![CDATA[]]></message></revision>
wiki.asp is a stripped down copy of topic.asp and shows only the original post when wikied. topic.asp removes the first for the same. Both have reciprocal links. Promoting to wiki is a manual SQL statement at the moment.
We'll see how well this works.<

what a smashing start - alas I can't test it in-situ, but what a lovely idea this is - once it's slick, it seems like a fantastic mod to offer to me<

I'd love to see this packaged up as a mod. There are so many uses for it, it's not even funny. I especially like the revision history. Very useful stuff!<

Cool, this looks really useful.<