When I see them, I will edit them, including the ones that have Dode in the title.

 

does that mean that we won't have another "pink and pull" thread?

 

Only if we turn into a stripper forum.

 

I would assume that that is what we use our tagging system for.

I'm all for a thread that would tell new members what to look for in a ram, but you come back to the very same issue that we have dealt with before in the past. None of them are going to see it. 90% of the new members see the site, the look at the front page, they join, they go back to 2nd gen, and then they click "New Thread". There is no mention of them ever going to the FAQ or searching first.

Grant it, having a thread that covers the main points would be easier in the long run rather than making them search through countless threads.

For those of you that see non descriptive thread titles bothersome, stop for just a second. The default search parameters for searching start with post keywords. The only way it searches thread titles is if you tell it to.

Now, I have another bone to throw out on the table.

Those of you, myself included at times, that love to hound a newbie in their first thread, telling them," go search"; all that does in the long run is kill the search feature. Think about it. If someone asks a legit questions, regardless of how many times it has been answered, and all we tell them to do is search, others that start needing answers to the same problem are going to see threads with no answers. All they are going to see is a legit question followed by 6 or 7 people telling them to go search. Over time, the threads with the answers in them will be suppressed in the archives that no one is going to be able to find them.

In summary, unless you have a legit answer to a question, keep yer trap shut.

 

In one of the other forums I mod (technical video) we tell newbies in the welcome e-mail to please read our FAQ before posting as it has info on how we expect them to conduct themselves. We have only a few rules we want followed:
1. Read the FAQ.
2. Always do a search first.
3. When possible, post to an existing related thread instead of starting a new one.
4. Post to the proper subforum.
Pretty simple. We also have a Sticky thread in each subforum explaining this. Still, every day some newbie comes in and starts posting away without reading a damn thing. Nature of humans, I guess.

As for redundant threads, in that other forum we are very pro-active at merging new threads with existing related threads when appropriate. We are very aggressive in trying to keep the forum clean and tidy, primarily so the search function works better, but also because it is a forum with a lot of professional videographers, cameramen, directors, and other industry pros and we feel it is an abuse of their time and talent to have the same questions popping up over and over. They offer their expertise for free and when the forum gets stale with the same old junk the people most likely to help just stop coming in out of boredom. This helps no one.

This forum is a lot more light-hearted and couldn't stand the same heavy-handed approach we take over there, but we should still want to keep it fresh and interesting so that people keep coming back and contributing. I hope to be able to do that and if it means giving newbies a gentle nudge towards helping themselves first, I see nothing wrong with that. Since this will be the only subforum on DF that I mod in, it should be no problem as I'll be better able to stay on top of things. Of course, I'm not alone here. The other mods will still be coming in to check things out, so between us we should be able to run a tight ship.

 

I was being SMART ***. When I had posted that u had already gone to work on it.