2 suggestions today! First of all, a suggestion from Yahoo answers. Because so many repeats are posted, and the search button NEVER gets used, how about a box that comes up when you click submit (and must be completed before you can actually submit) that says "These topics have similar themes. Did you mean..." and it shows a search of specific key words they may have typed. Keywords like "please reformat save" or whatever the indicators are for REALLY COMMON PROBLEMS, and it will redirect them to the appropriate thread. Also, perhaps there can be a guest account for the questions thread where users can submit a question without having to make an account. This seems fairly useless, but combined with the above it can remove a lot of unneeded question doubles and unused accounts. People who want a forum can do that, and people who just need a question answered can do that as well.
1) would probably be too much work to implement 2) we had a forum that guests could post in, but we had to close it due to excessive abuse.
1) We only have so much time to work on things, if it was our own forum software then it wouldn't be too bad, but this is 3rd party software and we have no idea exactly how it works and we'd have to hack it in. (Also SMF isn't exactly pretty code judging from what changes I've done so far)
