The issue with help threads is that often times people will not get responded to, ever. During events, the threads are unusable due to volume of requests, and the speed at which releases get traded away.
Outside of events, only trades with pets vr and above are consistently responded to. Lower value trades have a few people who try to go through and get a reply out, but we can't be putting the burden/worth of pets all on the shoulders of a few people. I have noted elsewhere on a discussion of fair trade threads that the rules of the thread also threaten to actively punish users who provide "bad" advice, which drives away anyone else from helping. Fair trade advice get shot down in favor of arbitrary "because i said so" overpay advice given. This leads to people who want to post with fair advice feeling like they will be reported and targeted for speaking up in those advice threads.
In other threads across the site, the guides to trading are also set by a group of users, the prices for certain pets are set by them, and if you try to counter this by trading fairly, you will be sought out, taken advantage of, and harrassed for not complying with the current wave of "x pet is worth MORE!", or harrassed for not using the guide/taken advantage of if you are willing to "trade down"/have a more generous take than the "3 month" rule.
These guides also focus primarily on trading "list" pets and other high values, which does not help a new or returning user without those pets, who is not is not going to be trading for them anytime soon.
This means that the trading culture ends up being one of suspicion, combativeness, and lying. People who mostly trade in lower value pets have no resources, and newbies/returning players are targeted, and they do not have any sort of welcoming, active, responsive, and trustworthy resource to use to get help with values and trades. There are no site warnings against overpay, and ninja warnings are only posted on the 18th instead of being visible year round.
I believe a good starting point would be to rework the fair trade threads as someone else as suggested in the site suggestions forum. "Trade advice" makes it much more clear what is being received, and allows more people to speak up.
I'd also like to see a second advice thread to give those who aren't trading vrs/lists etc a space to have their asks for advice responded to, and treated with equal worth, value, and kindness as everyone else.