Lately, we've gotten a wave of new forum users. While that is a good thing, we've also run into a couple of problems because of that. Here's the list from what I've observed, along with my take on the problems in italics
- Lots of redundant posts: Questions that have been asked a lot of times before are asked again. Instead of wasting time and energy by entering the answer, we should be pointing out to the poster that the question has already been answered, link to the original post, and advise that they search the forum posts before starting a new thread
- n-plicate posts: This has only happened in the last few weeks, but has happened 4 times. A poster, in an attempt to get more attention to his question, asks the same question in every darn forum on the site. Only reply in one of the posts. I'll come in and delete the duplicates with the lesser number of replies. Currently phpbb doesn't have a mechanism for moving comments between threads.
- wrong forum: Questions are posted directly into the LinuxPakistan->General forum without even thinking what the purpose of that forum is.Sometimes I move posts around into their correct place. But most threads of this nature stay where they are (maybe we need to recruit more moderators.
- wrong thread: People post their questions right in the middle of a running thread about something completely different. An extreme example would be a question a person posted in a job posting thread! For the afore mentioned question, I had to delete the rogue post and the replies to that. Have no mechanism for forking a thread into multiple threads.
- me-too posts: A lot of threads recently have had people posting replies that have absolutely no bearing on the topic of the thread. This may or may not be annoying to people depending on their annoyance threshold. I have no idea what to do with such posts. I really hate over-moderation.
- The too-many questions posts: Several threads have had people asking more than 1-2 questions at once. Problem with such questions is that the thread gets way too noisy. One person replies to one thing he knows about, someone else posts about the other question. While going through the thread, it looks like we're looking at an IRC chat room than a professional forum. No comments on this one either.
Regards