Currently, there is a lot of spam in DD and a lot of people can agree this is an issue.
In my opnion I believe we should lower how easy it is to find DD, the biggest reason why DD is spammy, is because people don’t know where to go and post, #help-and-feedback, #resources, etc should be higher up than Development Discussion.
Also, development discussion is simply not actually useful most of the time anyway. It’s just discussion, and something like that probably shouldn’t be the first thing you can see on the forum.
Currently it’s in 2nd place, and everyone can see it as the first category they can post on, which ultimately means new members will go and post just random stuff in there.
Pretty simple request, so there’s nothing much to talk about.
Now the problem with your theory that putting DD lower in the list would help solve spam is that it makes no difference.
If you looked at the categories section you can clearly see that DD is actually not as used as you think.
DD only has somewhere around 200 posts a week whereas…
Help and Feedback has over 1.6k and collaboration has 415 and both are lower than DD in the categories list.
So clearly the position of the category in the list makes little to no difference to how many posts are posted in that category.
Placing #development-discussion down in the Developer Forum, won’t change anything. People would still scroll down for categories and once they see #development-discussion it’s all back to square 1 where they began spamming or making useless topics again.
Despite #development-discussion, is in the top category, people could still see the “Help and Feedback” category, and if they still posted in #development-discussion for Help and Feedback, they’re either new, making mistakes, or are just too incompetent to read basic instructions regarding forum rules and regulations.
Placing #development-discussion below the other categories wouldn’t change anything, as people could still see this, once they scroll down.
Clearly, the position of the category in the list has basically no effect on how much off-topic topics there are.
There is spam in DD because DD is pretty vague in what you are can post.
Even if you are right that spammers prefer DD because it is the first category in the list then you are just kicking the bucket to the next category. People that spam would just move to the next category!
There’s more of a problem with the naming of the category and enforcement of the rules rather than position. Just like others have said: there are posts made more often elsewhere and there isn’t much rule breaking there. The issue lies elsewhere.
Moving it lower won’t help anything. Unless you put it at the bottom of the page, it will still be visible without scrolling, and assuming you do put it at the bottom, it’s only one scroll away from being used.
And assuming your strategy works, it will just redirect spam somewhere else.
I think you have a point, but this is one of the instances where the consequences would outweigh the results.
We all recognise that Dev Discussion is a toxic waste dump in its current state; If there were fewer people posting terrible things there, they would be posted in the forums that everyone universally doesn’t have silenced (which most people do, by the way - I recommend you do so too!).
