First, allow me to state I know I only have like 4 posts. Please do not let that fool you into thinking that I'm a noob on ALL forums.

Now, just like many, many other car forums, there's a big push here to get people to use the search function. I've been around this sort of thing for many years, so I completely understand. Its a real pain in the *** when you see 4 of the same post every single day.

Having said that, these forums return pretty poor search results, especially if you don't jack with the advanced search quite a bit. The problem is that the first page or two is almost always the same 3892734 page threads, so I feel like most of my searching takes a VERY long time to find something that I would think would be fairly quick to find. Also, theres an issue where it seems like searching for numbers with decimals and a word doesn't find anything -- for example: "4.30 gears" found no results, when I could find threads with it as the title, manually.

I realize that this is vBulletin and theres nothing you can do about it unless you want to try to rewrite database search logic, so I will offer a suggestion.

Make a forum any and all noob questions. Allow those who want to help the new guys out browse it, and let those who get tired of the same old threads ignore it. This seems to work extremely well on another forum I frequent (Eve Online... any players here? ). Perhaps that is the purpose of the New Owners forum? At first glance it seems to be more of an introductory "omgomg I has a z!" section.

Even if you guys don't want to go with this noob question forum idea (understandable), I did want to point out the reason why it might seem like people are not finding stuff they should be finding easily. I've been able to find what I want by doing some detailed Advance Search, but if you don't use it and throw in something that may not even seem too broad, you get pretty useless results.

Edit: Also, sometimes the search box is displaying underneath the ad at the top, requiring you to refresh the page.

 

Good its not just me then

 

I think we should have a "noob forum" and make VO the moderator of the forum...

 

Sounds like a win-win situation to me. I like the idea. BTW, if the search box is covered by the ad (which happens to me also), I thin you can still hover over "Discussion Forums" at the top and click "Search Forums" from there.

 

To the OP, welcome to the forums. We are glad to have you aboard.

Yes, the search function can get tricky, but it does work pretty good if you play with the options a bit.

This is a good thread to answer those n00b questions:
https://my350z.com/forum/2003-2008-n...questions.html

As far as getting a new sub-forum dedicated to newbie questions. It probably not going to happen. We currently have a nice clutter free layout on this board. As a matter fact, some of the sub-forums have been removed to un-clutter our boards recently. While it sounds like a meritable request, what will actually happen is people will go in there to flame. Immature?...Yes. Will it happen?...Yes. It will turn out to be nothing more than cheap entertainment for many of the veteran members.


VO

 

..you can eat noobs for breakfast, lunch and dinner!