I started using the net at the times of the bulletin board systems. We were just a bunch of people, and the mess of that continuous flow was barely noticeable.
Forums were a great conquest when the internet became much more populated. Each discussion could find its own place, and if you didn’t want to participate to a discussion on a particular area of interest you could simply avoid visiting that particular forum.
More recently, flat-list discussion have returned back in fashion. Facebook, Discord, or even Discourse. It seems that young people prefer this noisier environment, that is no longer a bearable thing for my age.
I admit to have become a bit lost with this forum after the number of participants has started growing. Having to scroll through all the topic titles is very time consuming, and very often, with my tired eyes, I miss what I could be interested in, confused in a mess of letters blending together.
Is there hope for the return of an articulation of this forum into separate sub-forums? We could just ignore entire parts of it we may not be interested into, and focus on a more restricted area in a shorter time.
I think you’d have lots of people posting questions in the “wrong” section of the forum, meaning there would be more work for the moderators to do to recategorize threads so that they can be found. Possibly a wider selection of tags might help, since the users with the Regular badge can help adding/removing tags.
Personally, I like being able to see everything at once, but I’m sure some people feel differently.
I have often wondered if two sections would be helpful: one specifically for installation/licensing and audio playback kinds of issues, and the other for everything else. That way the Dorico team (and any of the rest of us) could, when time is especially tight, focus on the first section to get users with basic operating kinds of trouble up and running.
The other section could include all of the other tips/tricks, feature requests, gear advice, and notational kinds of discussion/Qs (i.e., condensing, explicit rests, aleatoric boxes, metric modulation indications, and…hmm, let’s see…oh, yeah — chords ) .
Perhaps that kind of simple division would address the potential problem @asherber points out (rightly, I think).
Addendum:
To this I would also add a plea to all users to use clear and precise topic titles. Things like “Can you please help me?” isn’t…well, helpful.
I’ve been thinking about this since you wrote it. For me I sometimes want to relax a bit; to listen and maybe converse but for sure not to increase the stress of the day. Helping is still important, but I’d like to turn to a Jazz discussion or engraving thoughts or whatever - a separation between “struggling” and “discussing” posts somehow. Maybe it would encourage more of those kinds of conversation. I can always have a virtual tea and appetizers.
) .