I agree, very nice suggestion. Of course, I'm not the one doing the work, so we have to let them make the choice, but this would be a great idea. Currently the discussion section is probably 40% made up of similar types of problems (non-static is a big one). I think if there was a clearly written, easy to find explanation on doing proper references and common problems with it we could help out a lot of people :D.

You're right about us not being the ones doing the work, however the bulk of the code can be copied from the discussion boards - all that would need adding is an extra piece of data about each thread which holds the amount of up-votes, a button to increase that data by 1 and a button or similar that toggles between recently posted and highest number of votes. Obviously I'm over-simplifying here, but in essence there really isn't too much work to make this happen. Thanks for the support :D

Well: I personally think the discussion forum could do with some improvements, but I'm not sure that adding an entirely different board is really the answer. In short, people can usually find the answer by doing a simple search (either using the search facility on greenfoot.org, or via a web search engine such as Google or duckduckgo). For instance if I search using the greenfoot.org search facility for "non-static" I get several relevant discussion posts come up in the search results. It might help a bit if in discussions we try to give better help to users who run into these compiler problems. For instance in the "non-static method y() cannot be referenced from a static context" case a complete explanation of the error is: You are trying to call a method, y(), in the form: X.y() Where X is a class name. The "static context" refers to the fact that you are trying to call the method on the class, whereas the method is not a static method and so should instead be called on an instance of the class. To solve the error, replace X (the class) with a reference to an instance of the class. See tutorial #6. There would still be confusion if we did this however - for one thing, many people don't bother doing a simple search before they post their error here. There's no reason to think they would check the "tutorials board" either... I know the repeated asking of similar questions can be tiresome (it sometimes bothers me) but there are other options. You can for instance:

• respond to the post with an answer, which is specific to the exact question, perhaps also giving a link to another relevant post or posts.
• respond to the post with a statement that the poster needs to try a search.
• completely ignore the post.

Obviously the best option from the poster's point of view is the first one, but you are free to simply ignore posts which you feel are repeating oft-answered questions. In the longer term: we might consider doing some things to improve the discussion forum (but we need to discuss that as a team first). Also, if there's a lot of demand from users wishing to be able to create their own tutorials, we could look at some way of enabling that.

@davmac I agree completely, the search bar can do everything we've suggested and more. My only reason for agreeing with the suggestion is that people just don't seem to be capable of using a search bar, so a category style thing might help. Speaking of categories, if we do want to change up the discussion forum, maybe add another category called "Error" to distinguish what is referred to by "Programming". I find that programming is a bit of a broad term on a programming forum :D.