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Googling should be taught in schools; would solve a lot of this.
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Actually, my social teacher has used the phrase and encourages it a lot. Unfortunately, most teachers are still in the mind set that the Internet is bad and counter-educational. Oh well.
Everyone who is saying that a forum can not be changed is wrong. It's quite easy to change a forum, but if you're watching out for people's feelings, technical information gets lost in a jumble of "don't be so mean to the noobs." That's one of the reasons that I like procooling; we can be as mean as we want, and they learn quickly as a result. I used to have people mad at me all the time at EOCF when I told them, "read my sticky" but now they've gotten over it and if someone asks a basic question that is covered, they will be linked to it by several people. All it took was a lot of time and an unmoderated section where we could chastise laziness as we pleased.
One major problem with the "post a response, not a link" method is that no one will explain something as much in a post as in a guide that they wrote. If a person already posted three paragraphs on the thing in a sticky, will he post 3 paragraphs in a thread? Hell no. He'll give a brief, easily misinterpretted, generalized statement that's good enough for most responces. If instead of giving the short response he sent the link, he'd save himself time (explaining, typing etc.) and probably the noob time (reading, questioning as he doesn't understand the short statement, etc.) as well. But, since that doesn't happen, you get noobs thinking they understand the subject (from the short statement) and spreading it, probably shortening it as well, and the overall level of "net clue" goes down. If the noob had read the sticky, he'd have a basic understanding of the subject and may want to learn more than "well, the Maze 4 and MCW5000 are both popular options" (near quote from the site that banned Cathar, I think) and so might spread something with some semblance of knowledge.
This thread, with the references to stubborn noobs who don't want to learn and people not being supposed to flame noobs, reminds me of a thread where a person wanted to use 1/16" tubing and insisted that, using a radiator, he'd get condensation (he talked to a plumber.) He also thought that the purpose of a radiator was to cool down the tubing that cooled down the water, but that's irrelevant. Anyway, someone I know (record ban count on EOCF) came in there, 12 pages later (no progress) and finally yelled at the guy calling him a damned idiot (getting himself banned, again.) That's the stuff that doesn't need banning. If you're going to argue against something that everyone has agreed is correct and could provide proof, and insult members who have some clue about what they are talking about, you deserve to be yelled at and called stupid, and the person who does it shouldn't be banned. OCF, EOCF, XS, pretty much all the major sites are ban happy for stuff like that, working against accuracy if they know it (that they are working against accuracy) or not. Procooling isn't and they don't have near the amount of stupidity even with the few noobs that wander in.
I realize that if OCF wants a fix at all, they'd want a quick fix, so they should just put the basic watercooling sticky on the main WC page and that will probably halve the number of stupid threads.