Since it seems that few people actually search the forum very often, what about having on the front page somewhere a box which has common topics, like bluetooth problems, motors, stuff like that. Users could then be able to jump right to a list of topics. This might actually get people to look for answers on the site rather than just starting a new topic for every little problem.

What do you think?

Good idea, but also do something that the folks at the Parallax forums did. They created a search page using Google (http://search.parallax.com/). A similar page linked from the search button on each page would be a lot more useful than the built-in one.

Regards,
Xander

The google search can be done if you feel that it is more helpful than the native search. Though we need to make sure that this will not encourage more spam bots or in some way cause any harm to the forums.

Also, I don't have a lot of time to implement this but if you can narrow it down to specifics as to what you would like, how you would implement it, links to any specific tutorials, then that would help me add it when I'm at home.

Vu,

I don't think it will harm the forums, if nothing else it will make them more useful. It is just a focussed Google search, no more, no less.

A really good tutorial someone put together for their lectures can be found here: http://carrot.whitman.edu/Robots/notes.pdf

Regards,
Xander