BA Site Orginization - a suggestion

I notice a very large number of support threads are posted in the “Blender and CG Discussions” forum and get moved to the appropriate forum way below.

Yesterday there were like 3 or 4 hanging there with the “moved” icon. Today there was one left and I checked it out of curiosity and it was the 1st post. Kind of my suspicion.

I am not sure what the stats in these are exactly, but I am going to wager that a good portion of these are first or very nearly first posts from new members.

Here is my theory on the site as it is put together.

Usually when you first come here - as was the case for me - you heard about BA as the place to come to get help with learning Blender when you run into snags. It seems to be the most busy forum for Blender.

But when you come, the first thing you see is, “General Discussion” and then “Blender and CG Discussions”.

I don’t remember what the titles were when I first came here but the site orginization was about the same. And, it tripped me up too. I saw something about Blender, posted there. Where I came from, LightWave, we had a site and “LightWave Community” was near the top and most people posted support issues there. So for me this seemed the place to put a support issue. Of course I was kindly directed to the support forums below.

There is nothing too drastically wrong with this. But lets look at it objectively.

You have the “general forums”

Followed by Jobs

Then Artork which is a fairly long list.

And then the next thing is Coding. You go a little further below, you have Game Engine. And then finally followed by “Support”.

Now if we are following studies of people who first go to sites and what they are looking for? The issues they want addressed labeled in the fist page usually somehow.

Likely a person is new, never been here before, registers and is in maybe a bit of a bind and just wants to get the issue resolved, as quickly as possible. It is not to hard to understand, loosing interest scrolling down the page and just posting in “Blender and CG Discussions”. Kind of makes sense.

Looking at it objectively and not like…“well they should know…” and so on. Really look at it objectively.

Is there not some way to reorganize this site?

A few suggestions:

A way to put a “Blender Support” link at the top that takes you to the support forums.

Put Support above Coding and Game Engine

Rename “Blender and CG Discussions” to “Blender and CG Discussions - non support related”

Something. I don’t know. Just kicking around ideas. Like I said not exactly crucial. But it would save mods a bit of time.

It would save some time (I know I move at least one post each day most of the time)… but for new members I personally don’t mind so much. I have a much bigger issue with members who’ve been around for a while and they still make posts in the General Forums as a means of gaming things to get their answer first (when I move those, I don’t keep any redirects).

Cool, OK. Thanks for the response.