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[Jim Albea]

On another thread I made a suggestion of having a new sub-forum devoted to Frequently Asked questions. In that subforum the individual topics would be the faq questions. Within a particular topic there would be links to other threads elsewhere on the forum that address the topic.

Here's that posting:
http://www.concertin...ndpost&p=114122

Here's the text of that posting:

"I've often wondered about this very aspect of forums in general. FAQs are sometimes helpful, if the FAQ maintainer is dedicated, energetic, and persistent. But alas, FAQs seem to always eventually go stale. So a fall back from that is to admonish the questioner to use the Search function. And then, in order for the regulars to cling to some form of sanity, the next step down is to start exclaiming "Horse!" at the questioner.

The main problem is that all of the common questions have been more than adequately addressed within forum, and often in exhaustive nuanced detail. But it can be nearly impossible to find those threads. And then, from the point of view of the questioner, how do you know you've found the conclusive threads on the topic? And further, things change, lots of questions should be re-asked and often.

So here's a proposal: Create a FAQ Subforum. Set up permissions so that total newbies can't post to it. Or to put that another way, only experienced members can post to it. Then when a thread comes along that is a "classic" in some way add a thread to the FAQ subforum. Within that thread there would be just a link to the active discussion. If and when another thread explores the topic again, then add another link to the FAQ thread. Using the Forum mechanism itself would help alleviate the stale problem and maintaining it would entail the exact same processes as posting and editing (and the work would be spread among many).

From the point of view of a person just trying to find some basic info I can feel confident that I'm looking at the pertinent and recent information. From the point of view of a regular I can participate in identifying informative threads."

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I already have several lists of links to "classic" threads that explore various frequent topics.

If limiting posting to non-newbies is difficult then it would still be worth giving the idea a try, and just wait to see if that becomes a problem.

Regards,
Jim Albea