I never got a final answer about the mods I mentioned above.
Also, I don't remember where, but I'm pretty sure I've seen on a different forum that when you create a new thread, as you type it searches the rest of the forum with those keywords and suggests threads you might want to post in, instead of starting a new thread. Is there an SMF mod for such a thing? I think that would resolve a lot of the duplicate threads and threads started by noon.