General vs. General\Windows

Under both Audacity Stable and Audacity Unstable, there’s a General forum, and each of these forums has a Windows subforum (“Post here if you are running Audacity on Microsoft Windows”). For Audacity Stable, there are currently 25 topics under the General forum and another 34 topics under the GeneralWindows subforum.

Surely the vast majority of the 25 topics under the General forum involve users “running Audacity on Microsoft Windows.” So the practical effect of having the Windows subforum just seems to be that the “Audacity under Windows” posts are being arbitrarily split into two forum listings with no real substantive difference between the two forums.

This could mean, for example, that a user would post on an issue in one forum while being completely unaware that someone else had recently posted on the same issue (because that post was in the other forum). And it means that, for someone like me that likes to browse the recent topics every week or two, I need to browse two separate forums (with no substantive difference) rather than one.

And for that matter, I assume that many of the topics that will be posted in the Mac and Linux subforums will also be of interest to Windows users (and vice versa) because they involve issues that aren’t really OS-specific – e.g., yesterday’s “What’s Up With the Normalization Options?” post in the Mac subforum.

I guess where I’m heading is: Shouldn’t the three OS subforums be limited to issues that are really OS-specific? If that’s already the intention, it’s not consistent with the subforum descriptions (e.g., “Post here if you are running Audacity on Microsoft Windows” for the Windows subforum).

Am I missing something?

I agree with St33ve - and I note that the problem doses not seem to be happening on 1.3.x sub-forum.

Prt of the problem is the UI - where in the 1.2 General section there is a big “friendly” button saying “New Topic” - I guess that a lot of the users possibly don’t even go into the sub-forums fo windows etc.

So, I would support the idea of removing the “General” section for posting for both 1.2 and 1.3 - and just leaving the platform specific sub-sections. IIRC it was like that in the old forum.

WC

To clarify my initial post (in response to waxcylinder’s post):

I don’t favor removing the “General” section. On the contrary, I think that’s where the vast majority of posts belong. As one example, I assume that the “What’s Up With the Normalization Options?” post I referred to (which was posted yesterday in the Mac subforum) is of just as much interest to Windows and Linux users as to Mac users and so ought to be in a general forum.

My suggestion was that, if there are going to be separate OS subforums, they should be limited to the small minority of posts that cover issues that are specific to that particular OS.