This is a thread I had a read of at the time it was posted; I've since come back to it to reply
I do take a scroll through the Wednesday stuff from time to time but really, it's pages of space - I use the word space deliberately, explanation follows. Whilst normal forum threads have a dozen or so replies, the Wednesday threads are essentially conversations. As everyone's replies contain all the stuff down the left like their image, membership type, numer of posts etc, you can only fit a certain amount per page and it takes ages to scroll through. Essentially I'd say that maybe 7-8% of vertical space is actually the thread itself. Look at tonight's discussion, currently 13 pages and difficult to read through because of that; if you copy it to Word and cut it down to just the conversation, it's so much easier to read and follow.
My solution? I think that when threads get beyond a certain size they should perhaps switch to give less space per reply so that you can fit 10-12 per page rather than 3 or 4 by just displaying the basic users' information like the name. This could be done like in email programs where they compress previous replies or addresses. Of course I suspect this isn't something that the forum organisers have (easy) power over; I remember a thread ages back saying that there were only a handful of allowed formatting styles. Nonetheless, it's something I do want to bring up - it's predominantly the reason I hate getting involved in the longer conversations