Again, I agree with the SENTIMENT, but disagree with the conclusion you reach.

To use the car analogy; would you be thrilled if you had to wait a week to get your oil changed, because there were 100 people in front of you, wanting to know what size tires they had, or what kind of gas to put in, or how to turn on their headlights? No..you wouldn't. The first thing you'd think is, "Cripes, can't these people do ANYTHING for themselves? The mechanic is swamped with this, for no reason." This is exactly the same thing. Tire size? On the side of the tire. Gas? Owners manual, along with operation of the headlights. But forcing the mechanic to say "You can find this here...." over and over annoys them, and makes people with GENUINE problems wait. So the moderators here would act like the front-office person at the car shop "What's the problem? Geez, really? That's in your owners manual, and since there's nothing to fix, you can go now...NEXT".

Yes, first-post moderation is NOT a great solution, but as noted before, most new posters ignore the forum rules, question guidelines, stickies, and pretty much everything else. That leaves one option, as far as I can see it.

2 members found this post helpful.

I've always felt that first post moderation for new members is ultimately a solution, albeit a taxing one for moderators.

What I don't know are the number of moderators, and how loaded they are, as well as how much backup there would be.

For instance, do the moderators share forums, or own the particular forums they frequent? I'm sure they can intervene anywhere but if someone's a way better expert at a certain subject area, then I'm sure they stick more closely to their expertises.

Meanwhile, there are time and numbers. Not everyone has the time to be on the forums all the time, but this is clearly a 24 hour forum. People participate probably in various modes, some maybe from work, some only from home, some do not work and are retired (actually quite a few I notice), some are in school, or in academia. Ultimately people have lives and they go on vacation, or have things come up where it's more important than being on an online forum. So therefore it would mean that for something like first post moderation to really occur, maybe the mods would have to grow in number, and also be given a search mechanism like the zero reply search where they see pending posts. Therefore if a certain mod is not online and won't be anytime soon, other mods could see a growing backlog of pending new messages and then deal with them.

If I were to make one suggestion, it would be to suggest that LQ do consider a limited first post moderation practice. Perhaps that might apply to the most active forums first, or just first to the Newbie forum. The thing is, I also do not wish to tell the mods and Jeremy how to run this whole thing. I, after all have never run a website, BBS, or forum myself; just been what I am here, a member.

Learning is doing and again,,, I didn't read much here either...

+1

Unfortunately, I'm finding this to be the case as well. I would have to agree with those who feel that a more strictly enforced "first post" (or up to 5 posts) policy might help to weed out this kind of behavior.

Regards...

Maybe the **** people keep down the creative people? We're all newbies; if you don't make others brake the vase how will they learn, right?

So what is going to happen to this member? His/her questions do not strike me as newbie questions experiencing Linux first time.

u must b the ****?

Probably.

Apparently that member is no longer a member. Link shows nothing found.

I wouldn't be thrilled if I have to pay for the mechanic and would just go for a mechanic that has less work to do. On the other hand, if the mechanic would do the oil change for free in his free time (like we do it on LQ) I wouldn't mind waiting at all. Anyways, your analogy doesn't work for a forum, the only waiting time here is that from asking your question until you get an answer. Introducing a new waiting time (the one from trying to post until actually have your posts online) does not decrease the time for your problem (hopefully) getting solved, it increases the time.
We have at least two moderators for each subforum (more for the larger ones), with each moderator having multiple sub-forums on his list. I, for example have the sub-forums Linux-Laptop/Netbook, Linux-Hardware, Linux-Desktop and non-*NIX/General, as said each shared with at least one other moderator.
Moderators are advised to report to the moderator mailing list if they are absent for a longer time, so that other moderators are aware of the increased workload for them. We also already have mechanisms in place that show us moderated posts/threads in the forum software.My problems with the "moderating the first XX posts of new members" is not increased workload for moderators, but that it ultimately will make LQ less newbie friendly and that is opposed to what we want to be. A newbie that does not see his post come up after submitting it (that is something that occasionally happens, due to the way the spamfilters work) will, as experience has shown, just try it again (of course with the same result, landing on the moderation queue). If a newbie that has a problem (and for newbies that want to have help with their probably first Linux experience every problem is urgent) is somehow not able to post as he would expect to be he will just try it at another forum and give up on LQ. That is a burden I do not want to put on all new users just because some of them are "bad apples", especially when there is no duty for any of our members to actually answer to a post they do not deem as worth their time, so that they can just ignore those posts.

1 members found this post helpful.

We have another winner

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...7s-4175558237/

Edit: Put a fork in me. I'm done.