Has the "General" forum been deprecated?

I missed this thread because it was posted in the wrong spot

I get notified about threads created in the help and feedback forum, but not in living room. I've moved it now.

Which is kind of the point about what's happened in General (not about getting notified - about posting stuff in the correct location).

Some of our members have become a bit lazy and only ever post in the General Property Chat section without considering where a thread should live.

There is also this false belief that people only ever check the General section and so if you want a thread to get any attention, you need to post it there. While that may be true for some people - the majority of members use the "New Posts" search to find new content across all topics (which is the correct thing to do), and so it's simply not true that only content in General gets attention - you're missing out on the majority of the forum if you only ever check General!

I'm not going to go into details here about why it's important to post in the correct topic - I've already explained in the past: Open - Moving threads and I posted more detail here: Howto - Where to post

I wanted to get the General forum cleaned up so we could start again and keep on top of things to make it easier for everyone to find content that helps them with their investing journeys.

While we worked on that cleanup, I put in place a temporary restriction for well established members who have posted enough that they should know better and understand where things belong - so they couldn't start new threads in General. Newer members who may not yet understand the best spots for things were still able to post there.

Now, thanks to the hard work of @geoffw and @wylie in the past few weeks (and also @jobalba who has been steadily working on this for months) ... we've gotten through the backlog a lot faster than I had thought we would!

I've discussed our next steps with the moderators and we've come to an agreement that we can now remove the restriction I had in place and the moderation team will endeavour to move threads out of General as required.

We still expect our members to try and find the correct spot to post their threads - but if it's one of those topics where it's kind of difficult to pick where to post, then just put it in General.

I'll monitor the progress and try to educate our members where necessary.

 

There is a major update to the forum software is coming in a couple of months and we've spent the past 9 months or so giving feedback to the developers on UI functionality and features - I'm really excited about the direction of the product and I really think people will find it a great improvement on the already solid product we use now.

Two things they added to the forum home page are a big "New posts" button as well as a "Post thread..." button.



New posts works the same way - you just don't have to find the link in the menu.

The Post thread button opens a popup list of all the forum topics so you can choose which topic to post in without having to go to that topic first.

They've also moved New posts to the prime left-most position in the forum submenu - so no matter where you are in the forums, you'll find the New posts link in the same spot.