What the forum has become

[Antoni]

I have been here almost a year. I remember last June it was brilliant. I'm not saying things are awful but after returning I just get this feeling, especially with this new forum theme, that questions in section like GPU aren't get answered with the quality they used to. Before everyone would post on someone's thread giving them genuine support, but now it looks like people are rushing through topics giving short quick answers and then moving onto the next. Is it just me?

 

[TheBigTroll]

nope. theres been a lot more spammers recently and way more people that are trying to help but know nothing about what they are talking about. not to mention i prefer the old format ;D

 

[Antoni]

Yeah but I just think people are more interested in post count an points/achievements than actually helping someone.

 

[TheBigTroll]

the point system is gone. but now they do show how many best answers you have for a particular section

 

[jpishgar]

There's a natural ebb and flow to communities, to be sure. But I will say that the forum has never had this number of experts and users before in the history of Tom's Hardware. We have more dedicated, hardcore users than we've ever had, answering questions, authoring guides and providing advice and feedback to all. As for quality of responses, from my end, I've seen the quality metrics improve. There are more Best Answers assigned, but we're also allowing users over a certain threshold to set them - as well as reminding OP's to return and set best answers for responses received.

The new forum platform is most certainly less buggy and more fully featured than the previous one - and we're seeing new features (like the Tutorials feature yesterday) added frequently. I'm pretty proud of how far we've come, and where we are going as a community.

 

[TheBigTroll]

true to that we have more experts around, but there have been a ton more trolls ( ), a number of people who i will not name that tend to give pretty bad advice (ie. 2400mhz ram on a 550 dollar budget build is not right in 99% of the 550 dollar builds you put together), and the addition of spammers that post things like this that really get me. any way of permanently banning those people?

" i make 2000 dollars a week at home with my computer "

 

[Pyree]

Thank you for your opinion. Will put more effort into keeping an eye on the trolls.

As to the spammers, they are being detected by the A.I. spam filter and are banned permanently pretty quickly. But considering how many spammers there are, it is difficult to catch them all I am sorry if this makes your experience on the site unpleasant. The moderation team will reflect and take appropriate action against the spammers.

 

[Antoni]

I didn't really post this about the spam or the trolls, but if you go onto the sections it just seems like people will give a short snappy answer to a thread and move straight onto the next one, and it also looks like nobody else even touches your thread anymore unless you make another reply to it asking for more help. I remember you'd post a question up and after half an hour you'd have 7 replies of good information and opinions to read from.

 

[TheBigTroll]

my replys are rather short if the question isnt asking for too much. i do however give pretty detailed explainantions when recommending a product

 

[Antoni]

It might be to do with every topic being a 1-question-1-answer. Why is there no longer a discussion option?

 

[TheBigTroll]

my discussions tend to be rather short since everything is generally solved in one of my posts.

 

[randomizer]

It might be to do with every topic being a 1-question-1-answer. Why is there no longer a discussion option?

There is. It's the default.

 

[Saga Lout]

One answer is to lead by example, guys. Write longer answers even if there's already a one-liner in the thread and you might strike up a discussion and bring some of the threads to life. One liners don't start discussions but in-depth opinions are quite likely to.

 

[Antoni]

One answer is to lead by example, guys. Write longer answers even if there's already a one-liner in the thread and you might strike up a discussion and bring some of the threads to life. One liners don't start discussions but in-depth opinions are quite likely to.

Exactly, this is what I remember it as and it was great

 

[Idonno]

my discussions tend to be rather short since everything is generally solved in one of my posts.

You should at least put an LOL at the end of that statement.

 

[jpishgar]

Lockin' this thread down due to age.