Dave and I have talked about this and he mentioned that the community groups were once restricted and community members asked for that restriction to be removed.

I agree that the group system on this site is chaotic, but every system I can think of to regulate it seems worse (given the target audience of this site).

I think that the featured group system leads newbies to the main groups fairly well.

I do hate it when newbies create entire groups to ask one question, though.

Maybe just a bit of warning text on the group creation page: "Do not create a group to ask a single question or for a frivolous reason as it may be deleted"?

All it needs is for groups to be approved before being allowed to be created though in many cases if there was a list of the primary groups available up front like newbies, installation, theme/css help etc that would probably cut back on the amount being created.

Off topic, I know, but Brett said " Dave and I have talked about this and he mentioned that the community groups were once restricted"

Then, I ask, was there or is there a plugin that "restricts" groups? How did you use to do that?

I agree with regards to the number of the groups. As matter of fact, this pushed me away from the community for a while. But then again, I don't think the answer is in restricting the groups. Even in forums, you often see the same thing happening and people are forever being pointed to past posts that covered their questions. I guess this points to one thing, users, including myself, are often too lazy to digg'n'find. I don't think people would go creating groups if it is easier to find the answer without having to create a group. As it is now, finding answers can be harder than creating a group.. so, they just take the easy way.

The answer is better search.. I would suggest more search options with keywords, and, I would even duplicate the same search form and dump it as a dedicated help search form with a label like: 'Ask a question here...'. I'm afraid the search used here is some what primitive and needs urgent attention.

@Ron.. I believe you can apply whatever restrictions to the groups mod with a some code changes.

-Carlos 

I agree with carlos, the search must be improved. Even searching for plugins is not efficient, i use google for searching plugins here, becoz it gives better results than searching in this community !!!

I'll also vote for the Search, as it is really hard to find the information in the community. Once the search is improved, number of new groups and post will decrease automatically.

i think the forums at places like Rocket themes are really well organized and maintained. I've solved a ton of Joomla problems using them. Maybe our own modification of something like that?

They just need to trim back those huge graphics on the community page and list the common groups and that will cut back on a lot of the spurious groups...

I am new at this and  I couldn find a group were to ask, but my installation is messd up, it shows a plain html.

What am i doing wrong/???