Proposal:
Add a new category of topics for “Beginner questions” so that users can filter them in or out of the forum feed.
On my visits here I often see topics that cannot be classified as anything else than a tech-support requests, some of them quite lazy with missing critical context or no indication of serious effort on the author’s side.
Such posts seem to ignore the existence of documentation, and effectively shout “fix my problem!”. This is very disrespectful.
In particular, I oppose forceful exposure to threads that inform about alire or gnat studio or library x or gtk or mac compiler not building properly for a particular user.
This is not against allowing beginners to ask questions, but about forum hygiene and allowing users the choice.
Suppose someone posts what they believe to be a difficult problem, then a moderator moves it to the “Beginner Questions” category. They might find that insulting, no?
I don’t want to be making subjective judgement calls about what counts as a good question. That’s how you end up like StackOverflow where people are discouraged from asking.
Or they could find that helpful or, better yet, select the category themselves before posting.
I never imagined this could be seen as a controversial proposal.
Counter-proposal:
Add a category simply called “Help”.
Optionally, don’t require moderators to move posts marked as General into that category.
This way, some posts will end up there based on a user’s judgement.
Moderators need not be involved.
I think such a category creates a sound incentive structure.
Actual beginners are likely to use the Help category because they are looking for help.
Experienced programmers will know best how to categorize their messages, and in any case, their input is more interesting (it is a fact) so it does not polute the forum.
I like the topic of the question and I like the general idea but…
I fully agree with Jeremy here. This has been my main point for not bringing this up. I do not want to take on the responsibility of making such decisions and potentially alienate people/users. I prefer a hands on approach.
I like this idea though. I am actually a bit surprised that we do not have something like this. We could even have “Language Help” and “Tooling/Libraries Help” categories. I believe this will be helpful to everybody as I also agree with @pmnw that currently the forum is receiving a bunch of different posts and some people may like a bit more granularity. This will also be helpful if/when more users come to ask questions.
We can continue with the hands off approach and let the users tag their posts as needed and keep acting in good faith. Also, something like “Help” does not indicate if something is beginner or advanced, deep or shallow. It is quite neutral.
This category will only show up in the left nav menu by default for new users. Existing users can add it to their category list if desired.
I think “language” or “tooling” could just be tags for posts in that category. We can restrict those tags to the Help category if needed, but I think it’s fine to keep open ended right now.