I think the Xamarin Team should enforce some rules on these forums. We are trying to help and provide support to the community as best as we can, but lately, this task has became very hard for us volunteers.
I understand that since Xamarin became free, it attracted new users with different skills and experience (it is a very good thing for Xamarin.Forms)
But now with that amount of users, these forums need to be better organized. For eg. we have to answer nearly everyday the same questions again and again. Also lot of the questions are very vague/poorly presented that we find ourselves wasting more time trying to understand the question than answering it.
What I propose is something a la GitHub Issues, a template that need to be filled and respected. For eg.:
What version of Xamarin.Forms are you using?
Which platforms are you targeting?
What is the issue you're getting and on which platform?
-- If it is an exception, provide the full stake trace.
-- If it's a UI problem, please include screenshots of what you're getting/trying to do.Where is it happening? (show code, XAML...)
On which device?
What did you try so far to resolve the issue?
If a question doesn't respect the template, it should simply be deleted/closed (user should be notified why of course)
The moderators should also close all repetitive answered questions with a link to the answer (we everyday have to answer questions like: Bluetooth connection/reading/writing, display Image from byte[], downloading/uploading using HttpClient, Json serialization/deserialization, how to execute platform specific code in shared lib, Android build target vs minimum target...)
Moderators should also enforce the "one question only per thread" rule.
If you have any more ideas to make these forums better, please don't hesitate to participate in this discussion.