solution Please take troubleshooting the top, just above/below General Discussion

[AvMaverick]

A lot of people come to General Discussion and post troubleshooting queries, and not many users go to troubleshooting since it's kinda low on the page. Troubleshooting might be the most dependent-on-others part of the PC world, so it would help if it would be one of the first things you'd see on the forum. More people will be able to help, and many more will receive it!

[Ankh Tech]

I agree with this, people usually come for a one time visit looking for soloutions for problems, I tjink it would make sense it is in the top, and so should new builds and planning

[The_russian]

Maybe add a section at the top for a few of the most frequently visited subforums/topics? That way they are still organized under their respective sections further down on the page. 

[Ankh Tech]

1 minute ago, The_russian said:

Maybe add a section at the top for a few of the most frequently visited subforums/topics? That way they are still organized under their respective sections further down on the page. 

yeah that makes more sense, that will usually be like general, new builds and troubleshooting

[AvMaverick]

1 minute ago, Ankh Tech said:

yeah that makes more sense, that will usually be like general, new builds and troubleshooting

Pretty much sums it up! Right now, General discussion suffers due to the traffic from being on top.

[Ankh Tech]

2 minutes ago, AvMaverick said:

Pretty much sums it up! Right now, General discussion suffers due to the traffic from being on top.

wait can I tag some moderators?

[AvMaverick]

2 minutes ago, Ankh Tech said:

wait can I tag some moderators?

If you want to, sure! Hope they can enact on this!

[Ankh Tech]

Just now, AvMaverick said:

If you want to, sure! Hope they can enact on this!

well here we go

@LogicalDrm @Spotty @wkdpaul @Slottr

and @LinusTech

[Spotty]

It's an interesting idea, and New Builds & Planning and Troubleshooting were both moved further up the list recently partially for that reason. Prior to the recent forum update Troubleshooting was below the hardware section.

 

Most of the time the problem isn't that people are posting in General Discussion because they don't know there's a Troubleshooting forum or because it's too far down the list. They're posting in General discussion because they think it will give them more attention. They think their problem is more important than other peoples problem and they deserve more attention, so they post in General Discussion. Sometimes people post in Troubleshooting forum and then a few minutes later copy and paste the post again in General Discussion because they weren't getting enough replies.

That's not exclusive to Troubleshooting either. Happens for every topic on the forum.

 

If there are topics in the wrong section you can report them as Posted in the wrong subforum. Forum moderators can then move them to the most appropriate section on the forum.

 

4 minutes ago, The_russian said:

Maybe add a section at the top for a few of the most frequently visited subforums/topics? That way they are still organized under their respective sections further down on the page. 

That would still put Troubleshooting below several other forums. New Builds & Planning, Graphics Cards, CPUs, Motherboards & Memory...

Sorting by popularity wouldn't put Troubleshooting much higher than it already is. Displaying the popular subforums at the top and then displaying the full list below will only push other subforums further down the page.

 

4 minutes ago, Ankh Tech said:

wait can I tag some moderators?

You can, but the moderators already keep an eye on forum suggestions so there's not really much point to tag us.

[Nayr438]

You could move it to the top and people would still post in the wrong sections.

As someone who has ran rather large forums, you can place things wherever you want, as long as the user isn't paying attention to the layout it will always end up in the wrong section.

Truth is, most people just don't bother to look around before posting and most others just always assume "General" as the place to go even if there is clearly another section with a Name and Description that matches what they are posting and they are right next to each other.

 

With that said, Troubleshooting is already towards the top of the forum.

[AvMaverick]

3 minutes ago, Spotty said:

They're posting in General discussion because they think it will give them more attention. They think their problem is more important than other peoples problem and they deserve more attention, so they post in General Discussion.

I think the location is still an essential part to what people think draws a crowd. From personal experience, when I joined and @wkdpaulconstantly used to destroy my threads (not his fault, it was mine), i used to get pissed, because my psyche was "yeah, this is the top thing, so people will click on it firsst. And when it flew under the radar, it did well. When it was shifted to Troubleshooting, it died after one reply.

 

7 minutes ago, Spotty said:

That would still put Troubleshooting below several other forums. New Builds & Planning, Graphics Cards, CPUs, Motherboards & Memory...

Sorting by popularity wouldn't put Troubleshooting much higher than it already is. Displaying the popular subforums at the top and then displaying the full list below will only push other subforums further down the page.

This totally makes sense to me.

 

Summary: Please enact on what you think is best!

[The_russian]

26 minutes ago, Spotty said:

That would still put Troubleshooting below several other forums. New Builds & Planning, Graphics Cards, CPUs, Motherboards & Memory...

Sorting by popularity wouldn't put Troubleshooting much higher than it already is. Displaying the popular subforums at the top and then displaying the full list below will only push other subforums further down the page.

I worded that a little differently than what I was thinking, I wasn't thinking to look at the stats of visitors for subforums and sort them by the hard numbers, but rather which ones get posts misplaced most often (I'm guessing that would be troubleshooting and new builds). Either way though you are probably right about people posting in General Discussions because they want to get more visibility, so this solution probably wouldn't help much. 

[LogicalDrm]

47 minutes ago, Ankh Tech said:

well here we go

@LogicalDrm @Spotty @wkdpaul @Slottr

and @LinusTech

Please don't. We already keep eye on this. Tagging Linus is pointless since he doesn't deal with day-to-day operations on forums. Tagging Mortis would be pointless too since he reads every thread posted.

 

36 minutes ago, AvMaverick said:

I think the location is still an essential part to what people think draws a crowd. From personal experience, when I joined and @wkdpaulconstantly used to destroy my threads (not his fault, it was mine), i used to get pissed, because my psyche was "yeah, this is the top thing, so people will click on it firsst. And when it flew under the radar, it did well. When it was shifted to Troubleshooting, it died after one reply.

This sadly isn't our fault. People tend to use forums like if it was something between Reddit and social media. So Recent-sniping, not really browsing beyond some subforums and so on. Though comparison to Reddit is slightly funny since I've understood moderation of misplaced threads being much harsher there than what it is here.

 

I personally clean GD almost daily. After update and re-arrange, I do feel like there are less threads need to be moved to Troubleshooting or New Builds. There have been more moving to hardware sections, laptops and PC Gaming lately.

[AvMaverick]

3 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

I personally clean GD almost daily. After update and re-arrange, I do feel like there are less threads need to be moved to Troubleshooting or New Builds. There have been more moving to hardware sections, laptops and PC Gaming lately.

Yeah, I do see your work! Much appreciated!

[WkdPaul]

The General Discussion section sees lots of thread dumping, not just troubleshooting, but questions regarding PSUs, GPUs, overclocking, peripherals, even memes and shitposting, despite the section subtitle ;

 

 

It's not something we can really fix, even if we moved the troubleshooting section higher, the other sections will still suffer from the same issue.

 

[colonel_mortis]

In the last update (31st October), we moved Troubleshooting and New Builds & Planning up from below to above Computer Hardware. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to have had much of an impact on the number of topics that are getting moved into those sections, so I would be sceptical that moving them even higher would make much difference.

 

Also, that COVID peak is very impressive.