Yeah I think the problem is not lack of history, it's just nobody wants to go to the effort of searching that history.
Anyways sorry for the off topic, I have some ideas on how to make this better and will work on them
I also apologise for the constant off topic conversation, but IRC did in fact have a history that we often did search and save whole chunks of, there's also a whole lot of stuff we copied to the forum (albeit they're all in the spam section). The real problem was that the history was so often broken.
I wonder if forums are just inadequate. Too slow / too bulky with everyone's avatars and sigs, etc.
maybe each topic should have a live discussion or something