Originally posted by @Devin Mann:
BP should get a way to make people participate more in answering questions
This is similar to most other "enthusiast" forums I have seen on the Internet. The common features I have seen are:
- There are always an constant set of "newbie" questions from folks that are posting for the first time or second time. Often these questions have been answered several times before or the first post is in the wrong sub-forum, like "Recommendations for a title company in Orlando, Florida?" question in the this ("Questions about BP") forum. For many of these folks, they'll never post again and the questions tend to be of the "how do I do get started? [and I haven't done any of my own research]" type.
- Specific "newbie" questions People we'll often see again, but asking their first question. It'll be more specific than the first group, or pointing out why their question wasn't answered by searching for themselves. Many of these are the next generation of dedicated BP users.
- Each sub-forum has a set of folks that do most of the answering. These folks welcome newcomers, do their best to help and set the tone for each subform as far as culture and tone of most sub-forums.
- There are the "discussions among experts". Multiple folks with experience giving opinions or talking about an unusual situation.
- Quasi-commercial posts in places where those things generally aren't wanted.
- Discussions about how the same questions are asked over and over
- Discussions about how to get more people involved in discussions.
I'm not trying to be rude to the original poster. My point is that the set of things I've seen here are pretty familiar to the various popular hobby/team/career forums. It's always a smaller set of people that answer questions, I expect it's a personality type that many don't have combined with a smaller set of forum members feeling like they're experts on a particular topic. I don't think that's required to answer a question, just that many people don't think they know enough to answer
If I could fix one thing on BP, it would be to somehow do direct more people to pick the correct forum for their first question. I subscribe to this sub-forum (the Questions about BP and Site Announcements forum) so I can see discussions EXACTLY LIKE THIS ONE, but I get notifications every day about new posts with questions like: "". The moderators to a great job of moving those out of here quickly, but we'd all be better off if somehow it was more clear to new posters that there are sub-forums and they'll get their question answered faster if they choose them. It's a tough User Experience problem. I don't have a good solution.. As I said above, this "new folks posting to the wrong forum" seems to be a universal problem on online forums.