Need to get people to post in correct forums
 

Recently I find too many posts related to specific software being posted on main forum, even when those softwares have their own dedicated forums. I have been moving those messages but I am getting bored of it. It would help to educate users on this issue in a more prominent way.

I agree, the question is what we can do about it. These messages are mainly posted by newly registered users that have no experience from CFD Online. Hence, what we write on CFD Online does not make much difference. We have also installed an add-on to the forums that requires newly registered users to manually confirm the selected forum before the post gets accepted.

Would it help to show a message whenever somebody is posting to the main forum, which would say something like

"If your question is related to one of these softwares ...., please consider posting it in the relevant forum"

(Otherwise, your post will be moved to a random forum and you will never get an answer :p)

What I could do is to change the text in that add-in we have that requires newbies (people with less than 5 posts) to manually confirm which forum they are posting to. Today it is just a general warning to confirm the forum. Instead it could be a more explicit text that all posts about "Fluent, CFX, Star-CCM, ..." should not be posted to the main forum.

That might help. No harm in putting a notice in red to all users just above the title field. This only needs to be shown while posting to main forum.

The instructions video for newbies using forums that always comes to mind is this: Steam Forum Rules
Too bad it's way too childish and a bit harsh for cfd-online :D

But on a more serious note: new users should have to take a "forum's license", similar to a driver's licence, where they could learn how the mechanics of the forum work and how the forum is structured. Then after the reading part, they would have to take an interactive test about each forum mechanism, such as how to posting code or quotes or about using the advanced editor... because forums all have different mechanics underlying...

Another possibility would be a sticky for new users with a text like this: http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Ho..._Message_Board
edit: OK, Praveen already mentioned this one...