I appreciate the suggestions! I'm not sure how to do the solved threads idea either since threads do get appended to frequently and then need to be resolved again. If we forgot to toggle off and on some status that the thread was solved (assuming that's something we could do within vBulletin anyhow), I'm afraid we might cause more problems than it would be worth. I'll keep thinking about this one.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by having an accepted solution. I mean, I know we have accepted solutions to problems (i.e. Dreamweaver cache), but how would you identify those? I agree that people are not always self-helping or we wouldn't see such repetitive threads. We also have documentation on common installation issues like these in multiple places... and yet, people still post the issue over and over.
The tech support team does its best to link to threads where the issue has been solved instead of re-answering the same question again and again. This is a time saver but furthermore, we are trying to educate people that there is a lot of info already on the forum and self-helping/searching will likely get a quicker answer than being 1 of 200+ threads we need to solve each week.
We would like to keep people on the forum as much as possible as opposed to sending them elsewhere. We believe this gets them in the habit of searching the forums for solutions and getting more familiar with the support section of our website, where we have so much help content accessible.