I think this is fundamental to a For Beginners forum. Beginners tend to lack the skills necessary to find and evaluate information. Indeed, often they don't understand how to take general advice and fit it to their specific situation.

I think the answers to these questions actually do change, albeit slowly. While there is never a correct answer to "what language should I use", there are languages that you can use today which wouldn't have been realistic five or ten years ago. Something like XNA or Pygame can be the difference between a strong recommendation as a starting language and a more dismissive "sure, if you really want to". FAQs tend not to be maintained as one hopes or imagines.

They can be wildly optimistic about the kinds of projects that are feasible, and what a team cobbled together are likely to achieve. I'm not sure how to solve that problem, experience is the most likely deterrent. At least classifying and separating such projects separately helps them from drowning others, and having some kind of barrier to entry (e.g. a mandatory project template) can help prevent that idea a newbie thought of two minutes ago becoming yet another entry on the forum. I've not seen too much of this lately but I don't follow the classifieds, so maybe it is still a problem.

No, it isn't fun answering what seems to be the same question over and over. If you don't like it, as others have said, you can ignore them. In any case, during the summer break there is a lot more than the rest of the year, chalk that up to the younger folk having more free time. Kudos to them for using that to try something new!

FAQs tend not to be maintained as one hopes or imagines.

Something like a wiki might be useful. Not only for common advice as found in FAQs (as an up to date version), but also for anything else worthwhile like rendering techniques or tutorials or links to articles... There would be overlap with the article system though.

I'm not talking about Banning the users. I'm talking about removing a post which asks these questions and sending the posters a link to one of the many blog posts answering their questions.

I feel like the forum would be better if we eliminated this noise and directed people who ask these questions to the FAQ or another resource where their question has already been answered.

How about extending the rating system to include ratings for threads rather than just individual posts? People would rate up a thread which has useful, accurate, rich content, good questions and good answers... etc, and rate down repetitive threads which contain no value except for OP himself?

FAQs tend not to be maintained as one hopes or imagines.

Something like a wiki might be useful. Not only for common advice as found in FAQs (as an up to date version), but also for anything else worthwhile like rendering techniques or tutorials or links to articles... There would be overlap with the article system though.

A wiki for game programming and design? That's a great idea! We should create one. Well, actually, we should find an existing one to save us work, bully the owner into letting us use their content, migrate it to our servers, and do nothing with it, then let them fork it and migrate back to their own servers, later merging our content (what little of it we actually created) back into their fork, remove all the links from GameDev.net to the wiki, and then ultimately just redirect wiki.gamedev.net to their original domain name, pretending it never happened.

Ready? Go.

I think these remove the focus from the good, instructive questions and lessen the forum's overall worth. If we remove these posts, while directing the Posters to places where their question is already answered, we'll have a better forum. I personally would step up and look through all the new posts in For beginners at the end of each day and remove the ones like I've listed. Then again, I'd probably be a terrible moderator .

I'm not talking about Banning the users. I'm talking about removing a post which asks these questions and sending the posters a link to one of the many blog posts answering their questions.

I feel like the forum would be better if we eliminated this noise and directed people who ask these questions to the FAQ or another resource where their question has already been answered.

I see your point, but better for whom? If this forum is for everybody, which I strongly believe, since there is a beginner section at all, then those questions will come over and over. As rip-off said, "Beginners tend to lack the skills necessary to find and evaluate information", I would like to add they also probably lack the patience to read through the massive amount of information that is thrown at them every time they make such posts to the forum. I also think Servant of the Lord had a lots of good point too. I like the wiki idea. When I think about it, my first thought is that a wiki may be working even better than the documentation project that has been going on here for a while. That means everyone gets to participate to increase the quality of the information.

Educating beginners keeps the flow into the community alive. They'll either get help elsewhere, and probably stay there when their questions become more interesting, or not get help at all and possibly give up.

It can actually be an interesting challenge to come up with a really good answer for some beginner questions. Trying to balance solving the problem while also explaining the (often arcane) reason for the problem without getting bogged down in the detail, can be tricky. Another balancing act is between giving them enough information to find the answer themselves, without spoon feeding them or seeming dismissive or condescending - all too easy in a text only medium and when the people you're talking may not be fully mature yet.

Not technically taxing, but I think my years of practise here has done wonders for my overall communications skills.

Bad analogy. Haha!

It's the first one that came to my head.

Do you make powerpoints with Word? Haha