Suggestion: new subforum and get rid some old ones?

[dasein]

I always wonder why somebody new to linux would choose a advanced distro like Kali to start with

My admittedly untestable, pre-Mr.Robot speculation is here: viewtopic.php?t=114644&start=15#p559098

[millpond]

Forum software is often mistaken as being a simple discussion tool, somewhat related to social networking. And indeed in fact it actually is - but that is only a part of it.

It is even more importantly: An information repository. A library of information in the truest sense of the word. It is the primary purpose of what i use mine for.

Categories as indices. Sure there are aberrant entries, but over the long term it is a better form of information storage than the typical web page or blog software. Especially since subcategorization is trivial on most forum software (that I have seen - I use MyBB).

That said, there can certainly be improvements, not only to this forum, but to the forum concept in general. One particular issue is netiquette, which refrains on 'necroposting'- ideally one should post resolutions to problems encountered regardless of how old they are. In fairness there is more opinion than engineering on these types of forums, and debating some things such as gnome vs kde can get old after a while.

OFF TOPIC should be an unmoderated forum were anything goes, for the simple reason that people should be allowed to prattle about gibberish, in between working on the technical aspects of their systems. Like being able to take a coffee break without going down the street.
Ideally it should auto-delete posts after a few months, so that people can get some joy from reposting their cat pictures.
And Fluffy can stay forever a kitten.

[pylkko]

In the announcements subforum there is a post announcing the release of Wheezy, but no equivalent for Jessie. There was a announcement post for Jessie (I remember it) but apparently it is in some other subforum.

The most confusing is when you want to post about news related to new Debian releases/development. Should it go into 1) News and Announcements, 2) General, 3) Off-Topic, or 4) Debian Development. You would think that announcements of releases are not "development" but there are several announcements about point releases in development. You would think that "General" is for support, but if you look inside, you notice that this is not the reality. You would think that Off topic is not for posts about Debian but other stuff, but the moderators here have many times stated (and there is a sticky saying also) that non-Debian post are not to be posted on the forum at all, which then raises a question about the purpose of Off-topic.

It is clear that the categorization is unnecessarily unintuitive for posters and caters to no functional need. I don't think that anyone here uses the main page and the categories. But it was concluded in the discussion that even if so, this does not warrant change. So you are necrobumping not only in a historical sense, but also from a discussiony sort of perspective.

Personally I think this is a design flaw in phpBB. The categories should be displayed only upon request and not as the main entry point to the content. Furthermore, if they were "tags" or keywords, they would not be mutually exclusive and one could appoint a post to several at once.