"I don't know how long the pistol section has been divided into "general", "revolver", & "semi auto" but it seems however long it has been folks still post pretty darn much everything into "general"!"
It's been about 12, maybe 13 years.
And yes, some people simply dump anything they want into General despite the fact that we also have revolver and pistol forums.
That's why I came up with this:
http://thefiringline.com/forums/anno...t.php?f=1&a=97
Every member was supposed to have read that. It was made a general announcement when it was rolled out last year. New members are supposed to read it when they join. It's a pop up. Seems like a significant number of them simply click the red X and close it.
They're the ones who then scream bloody murder when they come back to find that I've closed their thread because it's posted in the wrong forum.
Is it foolproof?
No.
Short of active moderation of every post before it shows up on the forum, would anything be foolproof (as in remerging the handgun forums and remerging the rifle forums?)
Don't make me laugh.
A small but frustrating number of posters will go out of their way to IGNORE the handgun, rifle, shotgun, etc. forums and post their topic specific question in the General Discussion forum.
Whether or not the rifle forum mods choose to employ a similar strategy is up to them.
And then there's the ones who make us scream and pull our hair out. They go all the way down to the forum titled
Site Questions and Tech Support (NON-FIREARMS) to ask a firearms question.
Sigh.
The primary reason why the handguns forum was broken out was because it was too active. A new post could drop off the front page literally in a matter of minutes, and in a matter of hours be several pages deep.
It was very frustrating trying to keep up.
By splitting the forums out, it makes it a lot easier to keep track of threads.
We're not going backwards any time soon.