I get what you are saying. I do. I can e-mail those in charge of the sites and ask if there is a better way that we can handle this.
As far as provide a ranking system in which a user can down-vote a question so that it filters down into the abyss Every post has a flag button in which you can achieve this. I rarely see this used and I would know since I get the notifications about it. It is sort of hard for us to please everyone. People get mad when we ignore the SPAM, people get mad when we do something about it. People say the forums sucked. We upgraded to Discourse, users don’t always like the limitations this brings. You see my point?
We are just trying to do the best we can to make as many of our users as happy as possible. We only get better with feedback. Thank you for providing yours. We appreciate it.
I completely understand. I’m a big boy, I can totally deal with the inconvenience LOL. Thank you for your response!
I do hope that by adding “Posting Guidelines” would help reduce the number of poor questions and remove the restriction of not being able to post right away. Another option is to have a link above or below the navigation that says, “You currently do not have the right to post. Find out why!” and that would be a link to this specific forum post. The message would go away once you reach the respective level to post. Anything to help guide the user to some conclusion.
So far as the ranking system already being there; that’s interesting. Is it the “Flag” icon that determines the down-vote? I would only use the flag if it was inappropriate (bad language, racist remarks, etc.) I do like how Stack Overflow has arrows (up/down) right next to the question. I believe that would be more clear. Also, it’s a visual queue that most developers are used to seeing.
Yes, the flag icon is really just for bad language, etc but it does raise the post to a moderators attention so we can go and review/act upon it. I do like the idea of a vote system. That would be a good feature if Discourse added it.
Also not keen on the way you have to wait 10 minutes. I’ve found the best way to prevent spam on forums is to ask a couple of random questions at sign up.
Also, the forums are almost unusable in that the topics don’t even load on both Firefox and Safari. The loading spinner just spins forever. The only way I can use the forums is to disable JavaScript.
@space - I’m not seeing this. I use the 3 major browsers all day. I have noticed that sometimes the header doesn’t remain present after a long scroll. I’ll start a topic about this.
It seems to happen a lot less when I’m logged in actually; when I wasn’t a member if you tried to select a category, nothing would load, and likewise for selecting a topic. But I’m still getting it when I log in if I click around for a bit. I got it when trying to select Forum while reading a topic for example. Just spins forever:
How can I become a “level1” user???