Anyways, the point is that we should not only use correctly the forum but specially to promote to use it to other, for example, there's common issues on the forum:
Wrong selected category to publish a thread
Title can be improved (important for SEO and for other users to find the correct info)
Too much chatting and/or useless messages, or offtopic things (this is hard for us to control but it should not be bad to simply delete the useless messages IMHO)
The point is, instead of "just fixing things" is better if we promote to the others to do things correctly...
What we should use for that? I recently used the flags feature, marking as flagged something with a description (does the author of the thread reads this flag? I assume yes, otherwise is a bit useless to flag it instead of fix it directly)
I think that would be the best solution as keeping everything extremely formal and to the point would actually kill the interest in the forum.
For one, simple humoristic or friendly banter is an important factor to keep the forum alive.
Secondly, threads can get very long because of misunderstandings or step by step explanations due to a learning curve. The (former long) nvidia drivers thread is a good example of that.
I think moderators should indeed be free to sanitize existing (dead) threads and change new posts to the right category (immediately).
Howtos should be (more) clearly defined and follow up posts in that category either removed or incorporated in the initial HowTo.
In short: Do not kill the forums with efficiency, it's also comparable to a town square where everyone socializes.
Yeah I agree, we don't need to be extreme / radical too
we can use more the image
yeah that's a really BIG issue on the forums (specially happens when reporting bugs / testing solutions), I think that we should move these specific conversations to a real chat (IRC, making company to keyra too), otherwise the forum will be affected for these flood of testing messages, but the biggest difficulty of that is our "available moments", I don't like to be on IRC because is too much distracting for me and time-wasting while working, but if i don't are all the time on IRC, i won't be able to talk about these issues in chatting mode... hum!
agree , inmediate actions are also pretty effortless, accumulated work is much more tedious
yeah, btw we all know that everybody can edit existing howtos , making them shorter or cleaner (on which im known to be a long-words writer lol)
well, in fact these categories I found to be pretty useless (confusing and not used at all), so maybe is a good idea to remove them - by other side I was going to put this thread on the admins section but htere's nothing wrong to make it public, so its a "get involved" thing related to communication (communication on the forum)
just added the link on the "global banner message" last line (open the forum from an incongnito and you will see that banner message)
maybe it can be added as an icon on the top bar but i don't think too many people reads / uses them too
I think the twitter and facebook ones should be removed btw, yes this is a social-like system but those links i think that are pretty useless, also these social systems are pretty dead lol - UPDATE: DONE (inmediate action took )
off topic =
Yes, we can but ..... considering a new aspiring user will first check out the forum incognito and look what level the questions and answers are.
A welcoming bazaar instead of a cathedral (to paraphrase ESR) to start off in, is more inspiring. It lowers the risk of being afraid to ask "silly" questions... i.e lowering the threshold to enter.
So IMO keep the banter in the latest threads and clean out the old ones (i.e a week or 2 old) ..... this isn't "stackexchange" after all.
We direly need to grow our user-base and (for now) this forum is the only way to do it.
I have the impression it isn't as well known as you think. At least I've never seen anyone (except maybe me) make use of that.
Well I certainly do change or repair Howtos I've written like the non-wacom tablets or E24 (aka E23) but changes to those HowTos don't get marked as new so remain unknown unless the previous editor has an excellent memory.
image 
, inmediate actions are also pretty effortless, accumulated work is much more tedious
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