Purpose of General Discussion Forum

I know this is one of your pet peeves on the forum,just like mine is people using the Introduction Forum to ask all sorts of questions without even introducing themselves.But we can't loose our mind over it,at least people are visiting the forums.All we can do is keep gently directing them to the right place,or do nothing at all.

Or how about modeling questions in the Forum Technical Issues section,what can you do ? It's just a general inattention to details.

but... then we would have to muddle thru more posts of no interest    i mean if you put evreyting to gether and i am looking for ship posts than i would ave to go thru pages of armor/aircraft/scfi etc..... IF i understand your statement Don correctly. btw if i am not understanding please straighten me out    thanks   

Joe

I think you should definitely keep the individual topics separate.  If everything was dumped into the GENERAL category it would be too cumbersome to search and look through for information. 

I always take the GENERAL category as one to use if there isn't a specific category for your question.  Such as something like - what manufacturer makes the most detailed kits? - or something like that

I believe Don is posing a rhetorical question, i.e. the answer is implied.

I notice however, with the new forum change, that the sticky posts from the mods more carefully explaining the purpose of each forum seem to be missing.

Probably attracted too much dust................

When I sign into the Forum, I click the  "View recent discussions" box.  That way, I can scan through all the latest stuff on all the threads, and I find many things that I would have missed if I were just looking at the "Aircraft" thread or whatever.

Thanks for the reminder.

I needed it to find an old thread. 

I prefer the categories. Thx.

Tojo72

I know this is one of your pet peeves on the forum,just like mine is people using the Introduction Forum to ask all sorts of questions without even introducing themselves.But we can't loose our mind over it,at least people are visiting the forums.All we can do is keep gently directing them to the right place,or do nothing at all.

I prefer the gentle guidance to the appropriate forum.  This would say that we would not keep the thread going too long in the general forums. If the answer is a simple, short one, then one or two answers with that answer plus a nudge towards the correct forum is fine, but we shouldn't have long, detailed threads for an answer for questions better answered in specific forums, in my opinion.

I am afraid if we do use this forum for long detailed threads of these questions, the long term affect will be to turn FSM's forums into a single forum, like the old newsgroup rec.models.scale.

I seem to recall raising a similar sentiment about the "Forum Technical Assistance" forum several years ago. It seems to be happening less frequently there now, possibly because it now appears much lower down the forum listing on the main page.

Phil_H

I seem to recall raising a similar sentiment about the "Forum Technical Assistance" forum several years ago. It seems to be happening less frequently there now, possibly because it now appears much lower down the forum listing on the main page.

 

Good point! It may be that folks looking for a place to answer a question stop at the first possible place without looking at the whole (long) list of available forums.  Personally, when I recommend the FSM forums to someone I stress looking at the whole list first, but it is hard to get this idea out there to everyone.

Don Stauffer

Should we make the General Discussion forum the one-stop forum for ALL modeling, effectively eliminating the other forums, or should this forum remain for GENERAL modeling questions?

 

I'm one of the mods on another forum (djtechtools.com) and we have the same problems. We have a few mods in different time zones, so we just move threads and gently remind them where to post specific questions about something.