[Touch Pro, Fuze ROM Development] speed_pour:
Sorry for a long post, but rather than 5 separate ones, I just compiled it all together

I've been on at least 3 other forums in the past which grew rather substantially and became very publicly visible while I was a regular (I'm not claiming to be any major role in that success, only stating that I had front row seats to everything that happened). In each case, the newb influx with garbage threads/posts were by far the most often noted problem, always tied directly to the obvious failure to search. I've seen a few methods implemented to prevent it (at least half of what's been mentioned here), and in each case it turned into a catastrophe of either mismanagement, flaming, excessive banning (of both newbs and regulars), abuse of power, undesirable censorship of valid threads, and even once the admin simply killing the board out of pure frustration with the "solutions". Of this, I've learned a few things:

Red tape is bad. This site has earned a great reputation, but if it gets too caught up in infrastructure, it'll become a relic. An excess of rules will cause a lot of problems with management and moderation and frequently leads to some people abusing their power. I am not trying to start any fights, and I'm not not picking on anybody in particular, but a recent example of this is a slightly excessive number of bans that happened over some people asking questions outside the Q&A group. I've stumbled onto a couple of cases where this new policy led to an excess of force based on a thread that may not have been perfectly phrased or wasn't posted in the right area. The more heavy handed the rule enforcement is, the more a forum will be focused on those rules rather than the valuable content for which it is intended.

Technical Blockades are always imperfect and will cause more problems than they fix. I've seen it suggested that there be a bot that filters garbage posts/threads, a check on recent searches before starting a thread, and a few others. Take it from somebody who's been programming over half of his life-span, these are extremely difficult to build correctly and will FREQUENTLY suffer false-positives.

Post count and join date are useless criteria. The worst kind of newb typically has the highest post count, and the join date means nothing when you consider how many people admit to lurking for months or years before joining. Unfortunately, due to the size of the task and the absurdly subjective nature of it, the alternative, which is promoting people based on their post quality, is also unreasonable (and more likely to prevent potentially great members from joining).

I also believe, as Da_G mentioned, that required payment will drive off many people and over-commercialize the site. To take it a step further, it should be noted that newbs will then feel justified in complaining if they don't get service/help, sighting their payment as a cause. Requiring payment turns the site into a product, which is a bad road to go down, especially given the already questionable relationship held with HTC and MS, which currently see us as hobbyists rather than a business.

Finally, this "Test Before Post" idea is ridiculous. Besides complicated implementation and issues with languages, there's one bigger issue...KNOWLEDGE DOES NOT EQUAL ETIQUETTE!!! Even if you think it is a good idea, try writing 20 questions you'd ask people to answer...bet you start feeling kinda stupid as each question is just like the last one.

Suggestions:

Correct the mis-organization of existing categories. I made some suggestions in this thread "Development and Hacking" should be splitted which were aimed at separating themes/backgrounds/etc from applications, plus merging the multitude of themes/apps/etc sub-categories which are found under specific phones despite how appropriate they are to other models. Much of the newb confusion comes from poor organization. (please note, I don't really agree with the OP's suggestions in that link)

Mods should delete garbage threads/posts more often. This one can be bad if it gets out of control or turns into a censorship issue, but this will help with making searches a less cluttered and lower signal-to-noise in some of the heavily posted categories

A sub-category that is purely a

friendly

Q&A area, which is entirely meant for newbs. The existing Q&A is well-intentioned, but it seems that it's being inflicted on all users, and there are several examples that demonstrate that even Q&A isn't very newb-friendly. This suggestion might be better suited as advice on how to fix Q&A rather than an alternative to it.

Encourage and remind people to update the Wiki. While I've made a couple of edits myself, it seems far more productive if the person who discovers something would also post the info to the Wiki in addition to their forum post. How about a few people work together to organize the Wiki information so it's a bit easier to read and consistent from one device to the next?

One of my favorite suggestions, get more people to use IRC for Q&A purposes. Most newbs are only posting to the forum for quick answers to questions and don't necessarily know how exactly to do their searches (not realizing they are missing a keyword that we take for granted). 90% of those questions could be answered just as easily by a few volunteers hanging out on an IRC channel. There's not even a link to the IRC channel anywhere on any of the main pages, but I've seen it mentioned on here a few times??? btw...separate newb and dev channels would make sense...

Educating newbs (i.e. Future Regulars) on how to actually do the things we yell at them for is more effective than just yelling. There's already a short tutorial hidden in the lower bottom of the main page of the Wiki, but it's not obvious and certainly not going to be seen by newbs. Equally, the "READ THIS" notices in most groups aren't really read, and looking at some of them, they START with boiler-plate statements, not the stuff they need to see which is usually hidden in the middle or bottom where they don't bother reading down to. Shouldn't that information be clearly visible to them somewhere at the top (or maybe part of the sign-up procedure)?

Force some acknowledgment of some common procedures at sign-up. Many have suggested this, and I think duke_stix actually gave the best solution in post 159. I would add to it though, that the "simple screens" with individual rules should have a short countdown timer which might encourage people to accidentally read instead of just clicking "I Agree" and bounding forward to the next one.

Better written instructions. I know this will get some nasty responses, but it needs to be said. I'm a very technical person with a lot of experience in using and developing on several different platforms.....and there's still some instructions people have posted here and on the wiki which border on a guessing game. If people could collaborate on cleaning up some of these, a lot of newb questions would go away. In fact, if you look closer at a lot of the newb questions, they tend to even say that they read some instructions somewhere but didn't understand one part of it, or it didn't work as they expected.

Notice, all of these suggestions avoid making changes/hacks to the forum software.