Dev Release and Beta forum ideas

[shadowline]

Seeing many crowded threads in the development and hacking forum get overrun by people asking the same question over and over again, not to mention the ones that will never get it to work right because they don't read that certain programs are not fully functional or still being worked on. I have come up with a new idea to ease the pain on developers and make certain areas less crowded.

I was thinking that there should be two areas in development and hacking, one is the pre-release/beta software that is work in progress. And the other is the released software that is fully functional not counting occasional updates.
Both forums could have the first post as a type of 'sticky' that is viewable if you are just on page 1, or all the way on page 552, with an option to hide it to save screen space.
Also the released software (and maybe even beta) should have a sort of, formatting guideline enforced by a moderator of that forum.

Something along the lines of;
_____________
Name:
Version:
Description:

[Screenshot(s)]

Current bugs/known issues:
Known working devices: (if applicable)
__________________

You get the general idea, of course it could vary slightly depending on the application.


Of course it is all based on theory and could be changed depending on the needs of the moderators or developers. But I do believe that it could help cut down on the amount of useless question posts, and also help organization and make it easier to find and search for.

Edit:
Another off the wall idea is another subforum just for requests and dev ideas. Could help clean up those posts/threads too.

[joel2009]

problems with this is that PEOPLE DON't READ, its a good idea but would require a lot of time from moderators and admin.
No matter how well orginized something is though people are just lazy sometimes, everything you have requested people already put in the first post describing the program.

[shadowline]

Yes, that is true. But sometimes it helps cut down on what i like to call 'stupid posting' where all they read is the title. And they will tell you even in marketing, people don't read. So there really is no getting past that. Just ways to make the skimmers and question happy people take a second thought to reading the first post, and only if the first post has enough useful information in it.