Quote from: Atlas on June 11, 2011, 08:37:37 PM

Quote from: jashan on June 11, 2011, 08:35:35 PM

Quote from: Atlas on June 11, 2011, 06:25:18 PM

People have questions that deserve their own topics. You are only hurting the community. Topic creation is an inherent tool in the arsenal of the user. Without it, he's no user at all. You are denying complete forum access and the ability to get good support which is one of the main purposes of a forum.

I'd say search is much more valuable than topic creation. Especially as a new user (and I'm a new user quite frequently on forums), you'll usually find most answers to your questions just by doing a search. Sometimes you might need some clarification - fine, post in one of the threads that already deals with the subject you want to know more about. I think that's really the healthy approach. Reading first, posting later is one of the really good things that seemingly got almost completely lost in Netiquette.

I've seen forums degrade into "hey, why didn't you use the search -> list of links with related posts" too many times. It's not really enjoyable.

But new members forum sounds fine to me, too. That way, people will at least new it's just new people posting and it's not necessarily representative of the larger community.

I'd agree with you if forum search functions weren't so poor. The search algorithm is hardly comprehensive.

It isn't the 'algorithm' it is the people that don't know how to use search correctly.