Heya, just a few points I haven't really seen brought up before that might impact forums usage negatively/make the forums less beginner friendly. These all apply to the "All" category on the forums since it's the default one that's shown when you come to the forums
Too many sticky threads
The first one is that currently we have 14 sticky threads at the top. While they do contain important info for users, having this many could easily lead to decision fatigue which can actually making the info on the stickies harder to find
Taking for example the usecase where an user has had their post deleted by the automod and then came to the forums to look for an explanation on it: The relevant thread that's trying to serve that purpose is the 13th topic down on the list, making it much easier to miss and leading to people creating more redundant topics complaining about it
The worst part is, one of the sticky threads right above it is "Collection of Interesting Information and Forum Threads!" which sounds like would be the perfect place to link to many of the current sticked threads
I think it would improve the forums a lot if we took the time to properly consider what threads deserve to be stickied and shown first to anyone browsing the forums, and which ones could be linked in a general "Table of Contents" thread like that one. This wouldn't require any code and wouldn't take much time to fix, it would just be a bit of house cleaning like it's already being done elsewhere
Alias/Implication flooding
The second point is admittedly harder to solve, so I'll just include it for the sake of mentioning it since I've never seen any discussion of it in the forums
As far as I'm aware, currently there are only two ways to browse the forums: You either see every thread, or you narrow down to only browse the threads of a certain category. The problem here is that the way that alias and implications work on the forums, every new request is essentially a new thread that gets added and rejection/acceptance messages are automatically added as new replies to them, bumping them to the top just like any other.
That means that from time to time, the default forum category can get absolutely flooded by automod bumpped threads. Not only burying away every other category of the forum and forcing users to filter for the specific categories to find other threads, but also burying away every other thread in the alias and implications category that were still being discussed
The way the messages are currently working means that the automod by itself can quickly deteriorate the discussion on other alias and implication requests, which in turn makes the threads more likely to die without conclusion, which leads to them accumulating only to be mass deleted months or years from now, adding to the automod spam issue
As I said at the start, none of the solutions to this problem are easy fixes. It is just a core issue of the system that would take quite a bit of thinking and coding to solve, and I'm very aware that it's not something that would be handled at any point in the short or medium term
tldr: we have way too many sticky threads, can someone go over them and just leave a few stickied? we can put links to all the other ones in the "Collection of Interesting Information and Forum Threads!" thread or another similar one
also the automod completely kills the "all" and the alias/implication forums every time there's a lot of acceptance/rejections, someone should probably try to fix that too