The
Mountain Biking Forum is a good example of how to handle and not how to handle this problem. Once you enter the forum there is a "sub area" at the top entitled
Mountain Bike Racing. The Road Cycling and Mountain Biking forums should each have one of these subforums at the top entitled,
Looking For New Roadbike or
Looking for New Mountain Bike.
On top of that you could even go further and break each
Looking for New Bike Sub Forum into price range.
0-500
500-1000
1000-5000
5000 +
(these are examples they could be taylored accoringly)
This would make a very nice organized place for a newbie or anyone else to go and learn about bikes in there price range. This is MUCH better than a Sticky that is very hard to follow, often gets off topic and doesn't work for this topic. (Looking for New bike) It works fine for something like Barnett's Manuals but not for Looking for a new bike.
If you want an example of how it doesn't work go
here. It might have helped the people that were tired of reading threads posted by newbies looking for $500 Mountain Bikes but it does little for the newbie or anyone else wanting to know about $500 Mountain Bikes. This sticky is a looooooooooong drawn out thread that has just about every topic including a few $500 MTB's.