What is on Your Mind?

I think I've noticed over recent years that the number of threads started on the Emergency Support forum has become virtually nil. Why do we think that is?

Members cannot easily to find that forum?

The site layout has changed?

The longevity of this forum means that all the answers are here already if people follow the rules and search for answers?

The popularity of Unix as a whole has declined?

Or what???

I would guess it is because I redesigned the main forum page to show certain forums by default and to collapse certain forums by default (and so a click is required on the cross on the right hand side to see it):

Could it be that we are so great at responding to requests in the other forums that users don't see any advantage to using points to post in the emergency forum?

I suspect (but don't have any strong data to prove it) that another cause is that over the last couple of years you have encouraged us to use fewer infractions... so when we see posts containing "urgent", "emergency", etc., we're more likely to edit the post to remove those words or just ignore them than to issue an infraction and close the thread. I would assume that having a thread closed and getting directions pointing to the Emergency UNIX and Linux Support forum in an infraction note would increase the number of posts seen in that forum. The fact that the canned message for the emergency forum doesn't mention that you now have to click a couple of times to get to a point where you can start a thread in that forum probably doesn't help either.

I wonder if it is broken and not working?

Maybe I did something with all the updates, and template changes over the year and broke it?

That forum requires Bits to post.

Maybe someone can try posting there to see if it works?

I just posted a thread Are these Raspberry Pi kits really complete? in the emergency forum.

I was surprised that I had to pay 20000 bits and that bought me an hour during which I could start an apparently unlimited number of threads... I expected there to be a fee to start a single thread (with no time limit).

Great it is working! Thanks!