CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I came across this today when reading the latest forum posts.

From colemanw in http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,28737.msg122999.html#msg122999

This question gets asked on the forum and irc almost on a daily basis. Which seems to point to a flaw in our documentation and help resources. Since Michael McAndrew is working on some reorganization of our wiki pages and forums, it would be good to consider how we can address super-frequent questions like this one... aside from fixing our software to be php notice compliant, which we are making good progress on
Here are some solutions I've seen elsewhere, but I'm not sure of their relative effectiveness:
- Create an entry portal to our documentation that starts with FAQs
- Add some FAQ links to the instruction text when creating a new forum post
- Also in the instruction text, tell people to search before posting
- Pin certain topics to the top in the forums
Other ideas?

Was this ever pursued?

Posts on Civi content above headers in Wordpress seems to be the latest FAQ (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,30864.msg132452.html#msg132452). 

Would be good to encourage (better) searching before starting a new topic.

Can we customise anything?
A pop-up on the new topic page that says "Have you searched to see if someone else has already asked this question? If not, please try that before starting a new topic."

Also, one thing that may deter people from searching seriously for existing topics covering their question is the way the results are returned.

I suppose it works by putting the posts that match most words first, but sometimes I find that the first couple of posts are dated 2010 or earlier.  People may be discouraged from looking for an answer amongst the following posts as they may think "this is all old stuff".