I agree with EvilSeph and his comments. While the community has grown, so has the level of useless posts. Being able to turn off T&T in the latest posts page only goes so far. Often topics are full of useless comments. What annoys me most is when people, some of them with hundreds of posts to their name, getting angry and solving nothing, except to get people all the more annoyed in turn. This leads to incomplete support.
When people start posting on this forum, some of them are quite young. Also for some people, its probably the first forum they have posted to, so its all very new for them. As a community we should help them to understand how things work. Sadly, people with hundreds of posts who should know better, don't set a very good example at times. Surely by the time you reach a certain level of posts, you should understand how you should post.
However, there is a lot of spam about. One thing I have seen on other forums, and that may work here, is a cooling off period after signing up. A lot of the time, people do sign up without searching and post straight away (for now, let's just put EvilSeph's comments about searching to one side). How it works is that you sign up, and you are told that there is a 3 day cooling off period where you can sign in, but can't post, and you are recommended to search the forums as many problems can be solved that way. People are often persuaded to search first as they wait for their posting privaleges to be enabled.
This apparently works quite well. I am not suggesting its ideal, but if we are to improve the forums, we need to come up with some ideas. In theory this will cut down on the spam, and hopefully make searching more successful, which is one thing I'd love to see
Let's hope things improve, because even I have been tempted to leave after reading thread after thread of basically, just crap
