I've noticed that #chainbb-general is to me the least interesting part of the chainbb platform. I feel like one of the reasons is that certain types of posts, notably contest posts always rise to the top .
ChainBB makes contest and contest-like posts OP
Contests almost always ask participants to comment in order to participate, and except for writing contests, the content of the comment in itself is of no value and can even be composed of a single word. Due to how chainBB works, the consequence is that these posts are constantly propulsed to the top. For example in the last few days this type of contest has been extremely popular: https://beta.chainbb.com/chainbb-general/@jonipilo/free-money-for-newbies-minnows-unite-free-sbd-just-for-upvoting-resteeming-following
This post generated 400 responses and has been going on for 7 days. It even spurred the creation of an almost identical thread yesterday: https://beta.chainbb.com/chainbb-general/@yuvi/free-money-for-newbies-free-sbd-just-for-upvoting-resteeming-following. Needless to say, both posts are happily standing on the first page of #chainbb-general ever since their creation.
#chainbb-general is the de facto front page of chainBB
I feel like this is important because #chainbb-general is the first place you will go to as a new user of chainBB. And yet, this forum as of right now is probably the one that is the least representative of what chainBB aims to be: somewhere to focus on discussions, constructive discussions if possible (source: @jesta/chainbbcom-a-blockchain-forum-platform-for-steem) . Coming back to the two examples I mentionned, they ask for an upvote, a resteem, and to comment "done, done & done" in exchange for 0.1SBD . That's it. This is currently the de facto front page of chainBB. Threads filled with the word done.
Contests should have their own sub-forum
#chainbb-general is open to all topics, but I feel like when a certain type of topic is so popular, it deserves its own sub-forum. And when that particular topic misrepresents what chainBB aims to be, I feel like it definitely shouldn't appear on the top of what happens to be the most visited forum of chainBB (for newcommers at the very least).
On the other side, contests in themselves aren't bad for steem or even chainbb. A #Contest sub-forum will allow to increase the visibility of less successful contests, only slightly decrease the visibility of successful ones , and will increase the diversity of topics on #chainbb-general. I'm sure it will also help the ones that only want to access contest posts.
Obviously it isn't a perfect solution since nothing can stop someone from still using the #chainbb-general tag if they want; on an old school phpBB forum moderators could've just moved the topic to the right category, obviously you can't do that here... here I guess you can only encourage the practice of using tags correctly and not abusively, and trust the steem community. I'm very new to steem and chainBB, any suggestions for making this suggestion better are welcome.