GQ seems better suited for academic questions. Has the possibility of a computer forum been discussed?
Win 7 just came out and a lot of XP users will be migrating to it in the next year. Microsoft Office had a radical design change in 2007. A lot of users will be reluctantly migrating soon. I’m sure there are a lot of Mac questions too.
Topics in GQ disappear within a week. Finding them with search can be tricky. A lot of valuable computer advice gets lost in the shuffle.
I’d suggest all computer questions (hardware, software, networking) all go into a single computer forum.
(Bolding mine) Windows 7 has been out for something like 14 months now, and (nearly?) all new laptops have been Win 7 exclusive for at least the last 8 months or so at least. Office 2007 has now been superseded by Office 2010, which is (supposedly) easier to use than 2007.
Otherwise, I agree completely with the suggestion of a Tech Forum; there’s some very knowledgeable people here and it would be a great place for them to share what they know.
In general, we’ve resisted the tendency to compartmentalize forums. Some of the specific topical forums we had were created to resolve specific problems:
2010 US Election was done at request to avoid the usual complete takeover of Great Debates and other forums, and the subsequent irritating-the-crap-out-of-most-everyone that ensued;
The Game Room was created in large part because game threads were being kicked around between forums (being ill-suited for Cafe Society and thus fragmented between IMHO, MPSIMS and to a point GQ), and because the limitations on certain forum games within MPSIMS were not much fun for the forum game fans, among other reasons.
Technology isn’t really the same way. We’re all here, in one way or another, through using computers; it’s something universal to us. I don’t see a lack of participation in computer threads, or confusion as to where they go. It’s a part of everyday life to use computers and something that we all share.
That said, I’m not opposed to the idea. But do we make it a center for all technology, or what? Are computer games excluded? What, then, of console games? What about TVs and DVD players? What about portable devices like iPods? And so on and so forth, it becomes more and more muddled. I for one don’t want to have to moderate “well, this is about MP3 players, so it goes here, but iPads are portable computers, so…”
I think your hypothetical is going the wrong way. The question would be whether it was about the computer tech of the device. The moderation would be “This is about music, so it goes to Cafe Society. But this is about how to copy music to your MP3 player, so that goes to Computer Tech.” A bigger problem would be something like a math thread that included computer programming to find the answer.
I personally just wish we could have predefined tags, myself, determined by the OP of the thread. The forums would stay the same, but people who wanted to check for, say, tech related threads, could easily see the tag. Heck, even encouraging an informal tag of “Computer question:” in the title would be good.
