Been meaning to reply to this post just knew it was going to be a long one and take some time.. but without further adieu here is a reply. It's long..
1. Good ideas, potentially difficult to implement because of the requirement to fill out the data.
2. Still working with ISP on spell check option, but something I am doing. Need to get the pspell PHP module on the server. Although at first I don't believe it would be something that would be mandatory.
3. Believe it's possible with a mod. However, not sure how many people really look at the profiles.
4. Would be extremely difficult to implement something like this I would imagine. Besides the technical difficulties of implementing actually getting dedicated people to answer specific questions really makes it hard for other people to come in and participate if there are only select individuals for each category.
5. Really already done. If users let me know of problems with users, I warn the user if not something that is blatantly against the forum rules. If something such as spamming, I just ban first offense, no point in three strike rule if rules are already stated when registering.
6. Not sure if something like this could be done.
7. This would have to be something voted on before even thought about implementing. I believe a post was made back in the YaBB days about post counts. Lots of people enjoy the post count system and wouldn't want it to be hidden.
8. Whew, something like this would be way hard to implement, I can't even fathom a method of doign this (although it's pretty late so brains kind of fried).
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Replies to original arguments
1. I wouldn't go so far to say the forum is not making progress. But really it comes down to the users and the consistent problems of doing repeat questions. Many of the questions on the forums are also answered on the main Computer Hope page, can be found in the search on the forum and on the main site. Yet many of the questions will always continue to be repeated because of either the users inability to perform simple searches or because searches are not pulling results with the words they're using. So really it's not a simple solution. :/
2. The Off-Topic section was created as a way for users to talk about other things, help build a community (maybe get more users with more than 10 posts), and a place for people to just talk -- a place for users who may be new to computers who can't really answer questions to talk.
I really never thought of the news section turning to another off-topic section, I think it's a section that really has a lot of good computer related news, which it was designed for.
3. While I agree with most of what you said, you also have to take into consideration you're dealing with **new computer users**, many users have a hard enough time registering and posting a message on the forums. So you have to give many of the users some slack.
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Other stuff:
What would be neat is if ComputerHope had a special tool made for the forums that would allow a user to get their system specs when they don't know how.
My idea (although haven't be able to do it), was to lookup on the browser information and pull the OS and have it inserted into the message. Much like how the
e-mail support forum auto selects the Operating system. My problem is getting it into the forum code.
