- Questions under Support section is not necessary as quite often a question develops into discussion. Also people will keep posting questions on General Discussions board.
Well general is for discussion if a question ever turns into discussion op will be asked to create a new thread in general for discussion purpose.
For a big forum with lots of mods and members, it might work. But not for this forum.
Especially frorm the standpoint of new users (which many seem to care a lot about here), I feel it is very natural to have a separate 'Questions' board.
A newbee with questions will immediately understand where to go, and will feel welcome. Members with the initiative to help other users will also now exactly where to go.
And there are topics that deserve such a separate board such as 'General Discussion', and preferably shouldn't be mixed with 'Questions'.
To name a few examples:
- [NEW UPDATE] MusicBee website and forum redesign!!
- GUI changes for v3.0
- Official MB appreciation thread
- Wiki pages
- Any polls could go there
- other matters which are not a specific request for help or assistance.
When transitioning from the old to the new board, we can move all topics from the current 'General Discussions' board to the new 'Questions' board, except for the very few from the above example, which go the new 'general Discussion' board.
I thnk after that it will be very clear to everybody where to post and look.
The new 'General Discussion' board will probably get a lot less activity and new topics after that.
It will therefore be quite easy to maintain it in the rare case that some user asks a question, and oversees the big 'Question' board.
Summarizing, I think it is a logical improvement, and I don't see any problems we can't easily handle.
What I can see happening in the beginning, is that some more experienced members that are used to posting in 'General Discussion' might have some short learning curve to learn that also their questions belong in 'Questions', and that it is not some 'newbees corner'. But that would be easy to control and correct.
As a moderator I would probably hardly ever touch or move a post posted in 'Questions'.
And in the case that an initial, clear question turns into something that is not a question anymore, I myself would just leave it under 'Questions' and wouldn't bother on evaluating or deciding on if I perhaps should move it.
Anybody involved in that topic who feels that a matter that deserves a 'General Discussion' evolved from that question, is very welcome to create a topic for that in 'General Discussion' possibly with adding a simple link to the original question.
I would keep an eye on 'General Discussion' though, and would probably only have to move posts from there to 'Questions' that are clearly questions for help on a specific matter.
So, I am all for it.
Absolute worst case scenario: it doesn't work as well as I believe it will, and then we just merge those two boards again at a later moment. No harm done.