How-To Geek

I have noticed many users only post one message, and are never seen again. I do not know if it is because once their question is answered they never come back (without even saying "thank you" I might add) or if they just forget about the site.

I would like the mods and The Geek's opinion on creating a Guest posting option for those that will only be using the forum one time.

It could use captcha to keep away bots and be restricted to "X" posts from any given IP (which is not full-proof, but it may help some). The guest posts could be separated into a separate section (Instead of Win XP, Win Vista, Mac OSX, etc.) and the drop down that has these would simply be there to determine the area of the question. This "guest" forum could then be purged after "X" amount of days or moved into a permanent forum if information that may be useful to many people were to arise in it. (This of course would be controlled by the mods.) I suggest this because often the 1-post users ask very basic questions that may already be on HTG. Doing this would keep the size of the database down, though I would assume not enough to affect much, but it may help keep it more organized.

As a plus:
I was thinking of this to keep names from being taken up. For example if a user has the name "user123" and only uses the site one time, and an individual comes along who would really like to use that name and will be a regular user, then "user123" would still be available.

For what it's worth, I agree with you both. I was thinking maybe you would have to post a minimum number of times or you would get deleted, but that could just make the problem 'x' times bigger! What about a time limit after your first post? Maybe two weeks with no more activity? Can you actually monitor that?

Yeah good point, I suppose not. I take it when you delete your profile all your posts go with you? I think then the Geek's idea of a seperate place is a good one.

Colin. You can edit your posts for 30 mins or so.

I edited my post (4 up), Please read (I have red face :)

I had one like that a few weeks ago. Had wired up a place, Lights, wall sockets, etc. When I came to turn everything on in the switchbox, nothing worked.
I'm standing there puzzled, and my mate said "have you turned on the main power supply ?", Me, "Oh yeah, forgot about that" :)

The unlimited time limit was being abused.
People were going back to their really old posts and changing them. There may have been other abuses too but I'm not sure what they were.
After that it was decided that 30 minutes is all that is needed to correct spelling/grammer errors with the theory that correcting spelling/grammer all most people need to edit for anyways.

I don't like the 30 minute limit but I understand why it needed to be set. Without any edit history, there is no way to know what the original post was so someone could edit an old post where they said mean, remove that and make seem like the replies are dumb as they would be critizing a post that wasn't there.

Thanks jd. Got it.

I think allowing guest posting would be fine as long as the guests had to provide their location (helpful to know the users time zone and what technology/stores/etc they have available to help fix their problem if needed) and prove they were not a spammer somehow.

Edit:
@LH: I think that could still be abused.
I think for a longer edit time there are two options:
1. Display the edit history to all users, then at least anyone could see if the function was abused. Right now only the mods can view be the post edit revisions.
2. After the edit limit turn the edit function into an append only function. Then users can at least add addition information to their posts after the edit limit is up.

Colin. The nice thing about this site, is it's simplicity. There are minor niggles for sure, but, keep it simple.
But also for me, maybe others too, I would like to have a column on the the right of Freshness,
that had V or X or whatever, to indicate the category of the topic, (with maybe, a possibility to mark it, so that I can quickly detect threads I'm currently either working on, or interested in, in the short term).