Well said Matt,

I believe that the search first is an outstanding point; however there is one problem. The search within these forums is weak at best, getting a relevant return (if any) is a long shot. I have found using Google's search with 'site:www.dotnetnuke.com' to be the only alternative.

My 2 cents...

---

While I don't disagree with many of your points, I think the title of this thread was a little out of line. Many developers have put many man hours into making the forums what they are today I feel certain. Whether or not you love them, or they are perfect is an entirely different matter. To say something sucks just seems rude to me, and I think if you have constructive criticisms by all means post them for all to debate, but you could at least voice them with respect. Just my two cents...

I fully agree with all of the comments made.  I was just about to start a similar thread, questioning the moderation process, then I found this one

I feel the current moderation process is what is restricting the success of these forums.  I'm a relatively newcomer to DNN and I like to read the Blogs and Forums.  I tend to try to read the Aggregated forum but as with the previous poster become frustrated when a thread shows a new reply but when you read it, the reply isn't there because it hasn't been approved.  I get bored of keep going back to posts to see if the reply is there yet and eventually give up/forget about threads as they move down the list.

The very fact that I can buy myself unmoderated access for $99 a year indicates that the reasons for this moderation are more financial than anything else.  Who says if I splash the cash I'm not going to post rubbish, or in the wrong forum the first couple of times.

I'd love to actually see stats on the number of posts that are rejected, I'd be suprised if they were that high, relatively.

Everytime I come onto dotnetnuke.com there are usually hundreds of users, right now there's 540 guests but only 36 members.  I wonder if the members online would increase if the posting process was easier.  I certainly think it would help the success of the site and the project overall.

With 500 members online at anyone time you could receive answers to your questions in minutes rather than hours or not at all.

I understand everyone works hard, the core team need to fund themselves somehow, and I am loving the product.  I just think that it's such a shame that such a core piece of technology that is used to support the community, the forums, is setup the way it is.

I would personally agree with previous posters about moderating after the fact.  Let people post then lock, move and if necessary ban.  If it gets so bad, revert to moderating that particular users posts.

Pllleeeassssseeee Core Team....  listen to the community on this one, let's just try it out and see if we can become more effective.  I would really love to post/answer more, but I only get an hour or so here and there to come onto the forums and by that point I get annoyed at reading invisible replies that are yet to be approved.