New Forum Help Misplaced posts

[geraldthehamster]

Is it my imagination, or are there more misplaced posts now, in the new forum? Requests for advice are popping up in New Forum Help, Forum Information, Your Projects and General Discussion. Possibly the captions giving the scope of the forums could be made more prominent, and to the point. For example when you go to General Discussion, there's a caption saying "Tired after all that DIY? Discuss or debate topical issues here", but it's quite small.

Cheers
Richard

 

[ban-all-sheds]

For some reason the current situation is exactly what the site wants. Makes absolutely no sense to me, but there you go.

 

[DIYnot]

Is it my imagination, or are there more misplaced posts now, in the new forum? Requests for advice are popping up in New Forum Help, Forum Information, Your Projects and General Discussion. Possibly the captions giving the scope of the forums could be made more prominent, and to the point. For example when you go to General Discussion, there's a caption saying "Tired after all that DIY? Discuss or debate topical issues here", but it's quite small.

Cheers
Richard

I will be merging the 'new forum help' in the next week so that will be one less. Perhaps the descriptions could be made more prominent, although the old forum didn't even display then beyond the forum index. An update coming soon will enable us to present a message to new users as they login for the first time to try and direct them to the correct place.

For some reason the current situation is exactly what the site wants

Not quite sure how you arrive at that? But it isn't what we want.

 

[ban-all-sheds]

I arrive at it by observing the total lack of large, obvious, clearly worded, unmissable instructions not to post questions about Alarms, Appliances, AV, Building..... in this forum.

I arrive at it by observing the way you do nothing to teach people the importance of reading properly, so can only assume that you don't want them to do that.

 

[DIYnot]

When a post is moved the OP receives a message informing them that they posted in the wrong forum. I haven't noticed repeat offenders of any note so hopefully that is sufficient.

In general (and more for outside of 'new forum help'), it would be helpful if people reported threads in the wrong forum to expedite our job of moving of them to a more suitable home.

 

[Belboz]

As someone who VERY REGULARLY reports wrongly-placed posts, what BAS says is correct. It does not help with the wording of the very first section which states:

To help get used to and get the most out of the new forum please post your questions in this temporary forum

That is probably why new posters get confused. What doesn't help is the habit of regular posters continuing to answer posts which are clearly in the wrong place rather than reporting them and/or advising the poster to re-post in the correct section.