Yes, it’s not that big a deal, and yes, we can choose to ignore the post or respond politely and not scold the new person. But I think the admins or designers need to make the info for new people more prominent than it currently is. Every other forum I belong to has a post of some kind that appears at the top of the page, where it is most visible, with info for new people–“Read this”, “Using our forum”, “FAQs”, and the like. On this forum, that stuff is at the bottom of the page, and yes, generally, new people and forum old-timers alike tend not to scroll all the way down to look for things like that.
Add to that the factor that some people post things in the General Discussion forum, instead of a more specific or more appropriate forum, precisely because so many people hit it. So we have questions about aircraft markings, or the best airbrush to use, etc, in the General forum, because, as one recent poster readily admitted, “It’s more visible here than in the Painting forum.”
Of course, every forum is different, of course, depending on the webmaster, the people who work as admins, and the members themselves. I belong to some forums where some admins monitor their bailiwicks pretty closely and move posts if they’re not as pertinent to the forum, and some where the admin will even contact the poster to let him know why his post was moved. And in one of the other forums I belong to, the community of members polices things like this for itself, keeping the number of posts in the wrong place and irrelevant to the specific forum at a minimum.
But you’ll never eliminate this, so I choose not to think about it so much. But I can appreciate and sympathize with other forum members who find it frustrating that, because of relatively sloppy thinking when posting, or yes, a bit of laziness, it makes it more work to try to find things. I understand that they might feel that they’re missing things, or, that other areas become cluttered with posts not as relevant to the forum’s theme.
