Why are new people only allowed to reply 3 times? This is crazy.
It’s most certainly needed, unfortunately, as SPAM prevention.
There are tens or hundreds of people around the world who’s entire job is to create new accounts on Forum websites and spam them.
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Oh… Also; The policy encourages new people to browse, search, and do “a lot” of reading first before posting. Fact is that 80% or more of all novice questions already have answers on the Forum. There’s no justification to post investing some time first.
If your question is urgent: Support@SmartThings.com
(Just explaining the Forum policy … don’t shoot the messenger 
).
It is true. There are threads literally hundreds and thousands of posts long discussing in detail an issue… And then not along comes 12 new folks starting brand new threads about the exact same thing.
That makes it obvious that they have done zero reading or searching on the forum. And 99% of the time when you go back a week later, they haven’t even made a second post about anything.
The most obvious ones are where a newbie comes on, start a thread, and declared how their problem is the worst thing in the universe and that ST is going to be sued, or they are selling all of their massive investment. I personally like the folks that are throwing it in the trash. I ask them for their address so I can go get the stuff.
Now, nothing bad to newbie, all of us started out that way… We just want you to be an active member and learn and contribute.
The the replies thing doesn’t last that long.
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Truthfully, forum layout is kind of an issue. Theres a bit of a curve to learning the forum hosting services system, then theres the forum sections, and then theres how power users choose to use the form. To me, (after a couple months here) I feel like this forum is flooded by disorganized posts (by newbies) because there are no designated FAQ and Q&A(support) sections (So far as i can tell).
Even if there were, it would require good organization of common or critical information to keep a lot of unnecessary posts from flooding about.
For example, if every [RELEASE] smartapp were in a special release category and had in its first post, a link to a dedicated support thread. And the creator used the first post of that support thread to link to FAQ solutions in the thread. Then the release thread itself would remain relatively short and more topical, and much easier to browse.
Creating a dedicated support category would move and reduce a LOT of the misplaced and duplicate threads. Just my 2 cents. (And if I’m missing somehow that there is already a 'good system for this, well, I’ve been here 2 months without catching on to it… so its not very intuitive)
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Yeah, if search and these forums were accessible to new users then we wouldn’t have this issue. Unfortunately, ST has chosen a community technology that is designed and built for engineers/developers vs actual consumer users. Discourse based sites are rarely (if ever) successful when presented to consumer users vs those with more technical acumen. Don’t hate on the new users! 
I’d ask for suggestions for different formats / services, but SmartThings just ignores any such suggestions. I’ve recommended UserVoice (and some that follow the same model…) several times.
Then again, SmartTiles wants to choose a consumer facing service … do you have a recommendation?