As moderator, I have no control of the forum, other than to approve or disapprove posts.  You're right, there are a lot of repeated questions here, but that is true on many of the other forums also.  It will probably always be that way.  I have always used the name 'Newbie Manual' and will now try to remember to use the correct name when referring people to it.

I think newbies are sometimes overwhelmed at all the information that is available, and don't know how to do a search for something in particular.  I do like your suggestion about the dialog box for new threads, but that might irritate some of the  veterans on here.  Maybe have it only on the Newbie forum and not on others.

Thanks for your input, you might want to make your suggestions directly to admin and see what they say.

Swim

Forgive me if this belongs in the Suggestions & Policies Board, but I thought it deserved mention here.

It seems that a lot of the needlessly repetitive questions on this board could be avoided if some common sense were applied in the layout of the main page and the terminology used.

Mainly, it's obvious that nobody reads the little paragraph at the top of the main page, or if they do, they don't understand what it's asking them to do before starting a new thread. Wouldn't it be great if, when you click the New Thread button, a dialog box asked if you've read the Newbie Manual for an answer to your question? You could click 'Yes, I've read it, thanks' or 'No, please take me there'.

Something similar might be done with the suggestion to first read recent threads or try search.

If that's too much coding for TER, how about at least making the terminology consistent, instead of expecting newbies to surmise that "Newbie Manual" means to click on "Self Help Center".

Of course, it's possible that 99% of newbies figure all this out and therefore never ask redundant questions, and the ones who do ask always will, no matter how sensible it's all made for them. Maybe, but I still think it's worth a try.

It says 'Acronyms and Newbies Manual' on the classic version, not sure what it says on the new version.

Swim

Newbie here...I'm looking for "newbie manual" I just read about in this thread. Yes, this site is overwhelming to navigate (speaking for myself as a NON-computer type).
As well, I'm not at paid or VIP level, yet; by just joining as basic step, do I have a TER #?
Thnx for any help.

Too many sites (not just TER) have FAQs that were originally written by the site creators to Answer Qs that they THOUGHT might come up Frequently.  After a period of use, the REAL FAQs come up over and over in the forums. Those are the REAL Qs that should be posed and answered in the FAQ.

Getting newbies (on any site) to read the FAQ is another problem, but a well written, well organized FAQ won't scare them off. There should be very few "I looked but didn't find it." complaints.

Given all that, I will often reply to a POSTED newbie Q and refer to recent discussions of the same topic (with a link).

I know it's hard to get newbies to read the Self Help, FAQ, Newbie or whatever you want to call it anyway but I'm thinking that an electric cattle prod would help.

It says Self-Help Center on the current version. The paragraph next to the link hasn't been updated to reflect the change.

BTW, I doubt if many newbies are using Classic TER or even know that it exists.

only questions that have been frequently asked are welcome here.

Thnx, but I'm not finding it.

is the lack of a decent search function. I've done some amount of web coding, mainly php, before and I am still unsure of how the hell it works. It's bad enough that you can't specify whether you want to search entire posts or just thread titles, but the results that it spits back in your face are terrible. They're completely unorganized, just a collection of posts. Break them down by thread, or at least show the thread name. What's more, if you search for a particular keyword, you'll get a lot of duplicate results from every post in a thread that quotes the OP containing that keyword. The "day range" function isn't difficult to figure out but it's completely counter-intuitive. Oh, and I'm still not entirely sure what the "include text" option does, is it even remotely helpful?