[Epic 4G Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] plapczyn:
I'm sure all of you are getting sick of the flood of questions that come in and the single question and answer thread is just too long to go through to find questions let alone answer them. Hopefully we can get enough people on board to let the moderators know that this is a welcome addition. Seeing as how many phones have highest number of threads in the Q&A section, I think it is a worthy addition.

Problems:

1) Lack of moderation - the volume of posts, especially from new users is higher than the what can reasonably be moderated by the current number of moderators.

2) Relevant threads containing real information are buried by new threads (many which are off topic or not posted in the correct forum)

3) The forum is disorganized, which exacerbates the issue of new users asking duplicate, off topic, poor, misinformed questions.

4) There is an incredible lack of information for new users on usage, which creates a contentious atmosphere between new users and senior members who re-answer the same questions over and over, most of the time about HOW to use the forum and search features.

5) User modifiable resources like the wiki are unknown or obfuscated from new and long time members alike, thus rarely used. (On a side note....we should all be using the wiki to push pertinent information, valueable posts, references and guides up so that noobs (and experienced users also) can find them easier.)

Proposed Solutions:

1) Create additional subforums to help organize posts into relevant categories. (I vote for at least Q&A. MOST popular forums on XDA have this, so there is certainly precedent.)

2) Better sticky posts, with clearer titles. "Hello from your moderator." is not as clear to a new user as "[MANDATORY README]-[FORUM RULES][QUESTIONS][INSTRUCTIONS][If you don't read this you will be flamed, harrassed, possibly shanked in your sleep!]" You are reading this thread because of the title...that or you saw the DVDA postfix...you sick sick bastard...either way I win.

3) More moderators. It is far too hard for Whosdaman to constantly update sticky posts with relevant info. It is up to everyone here to get that info out so we aren't bombarded with questions that have been answered a hundred times. Wiki anyone?

4) We have a great resource in user editable wiki. There is a lot of stuff that can be done BETTER on a wiki than in a 1000 post thread, like reference material, guides, and instructions. We need to make it obvious to ALL users that the wiki exists and get people on board with updating it. Threads are a great way to hash out possible solutions and have a group discussion, but a lot of times what people need is a reference or guide and they shouldn't have to search a 1000 post thread to pull the relevant information.

5) Original posters need to update their OP when new information is revealed or when there is misinformation in a post. Having a post that's title says your flash cell is about to explode only to have to read 600 posts to find out that this information is untrue helps no one. Discussion is GREAT. Misinformation is NOT, and only fuels the confusion and duplicate thread issues.

From The Front Line:

Thanks for the outpouring of support and ideas to help get the ball rolling. Several of our ideas have been recently implemented so I am really hoping for some good news next war update.

20110109: Woot! We now have Q&A. Thanks mods and supporters!

20110109: My social experiment of double entendre "sticky posts" has 2000 views in only a couple of days. I'm not going to call this one confirmed, but if it stopped even 1 bad thread it was worth it.

20110109: We have sticky wiki in all the subforums. Now we need to add content to the wiki before people stop using it.

One Last Thing:

There are very few things we can change with regard to how many new users visit this forum, or the knowledge level of these users. The only thing we CAN do is make what they need to do as obvious as possible to these users, so that we can spend more time coding and writing relevant posts, instead of redirecting people to the search button, or frustration flaming newbies.