It depends on the type of content on the website and may also depend on its PageRank. Static pages providing rarely-updated information may get a visit every other month or so, and a popular blog with many posts a day could get crawled several times a day. (although in the case of a blog, usually the blogging software will ping search engines, and so are crawled on-demand)
It appears that those are forum posts on a moderate-traffic site, so it should get crawled a few times a week. Even my own website, which currently has a under 8,000,000 ranking on Alexa, gets crawled every week to every other week with a near-daily robots.txt request.
Pages with similar content should automatically get grouped together, but if it isn't, try the rel="canonical" tip given by the other answerers.
@Chris: No, that setting does not change how often your site is crawled, only how fast Google requests the pages during the crawl. It's a misleading setting, and a lot of people make that mistake, even though the help pages clearly indicate this.