I've noticed a couple of times now that when a game has a major announcement, such as TSW or Tera going f2p, that mods close a thread related to said announcement, stipulating that it should have been posted in the megathread. Truth be told, I expect that only a core of people follow those threads religiously. Certainly in my case, if such announcements were confined purely to the megathread, I would never have known about said news. I expect there are snippets I have missed in the past also.
I think it's a good idea to let major announcements like this be posted in new threads, so that passers by can be made aware of things they would miss if they were confined to a larger thread that they may be intimidated to start to read, or at that period of time does not have much interest in diving into a thread to see what information might be available.
Obviously rules would need to be enforced to not devalue a megathread entirely. Something like, big announcements are acceptable as a separate thread, linking to the megathread itself in the first post. Allowing only chat about that announcement would keep it afloat for a little time, but it would eventually die off leaving the megathread where it needs to be. Or something similar.
We've (we being video game mods) chatted about this since the TERA F2P announcement and are working to see if there's a better way we can handle announcements like that where people who previously didn't find interest in the game due to it being subscription-based might now that it's free-to-play
For now, we're changing thread titles to reflect announcements like that. If something arises that can't be covered in a thread title, we'll re-visit it
Edit: See what Sunshine said; the announcement is now in it's own thread!
Sometimes things do not belong in a megathread, yes -- they should be allowed to have their own threads. Things interesting only to the people who already play the game generally belong to the large thread. Sometimes we allow separate threads for meaningful and well-defined related topics -- for example, we had a skyrim technical issues thread separate from the main skyrim megathread.
If you have particular examples of threads which should be left open, feel free to PM the mod who closed it / mods of the forum / super mod / myself to request that it be reopened anad give your reasoning.
The only noticeable one was the announcement of TSW going f2p. Haven't seen anything since but I don't think it was the fault of anyone in particular that that got closed. It did its job for some of us anyway!