I'm not trying to put Trap17 down, but I've been getting kind of overwhelmed with all of the topics Trap17 has to offer.
It's kind of a good thing, because you always have something to write about, so you can always get points; but it gets to be too much after a while.

First of all, I can never figure out where to post anything. They have a tutorial section, but they have a completely different section for Photoshop tutorials. Once, I found a perfectly good tutorial (I don't remember what it was on), but I got in there, and it said it was moved, and it didn't say where to.

Also, the search doesn't work for anything smaller than four characters. I never know if there is something else posted on PHP, because it doesn't let me do the search. I don't really want to look through hundreds of pages trying to figure out if someone has already posted a tutorial on PHP comment boxes, so I just posted one. I completely understand their reasoning for making the searches have to be at least four characters, but they could at least make it only search the title for anything smaller than that(That might be really hard, I know, but it's possible).

Finally, I know it's probably just me, but when I'm going to post something, I have to read everything that everyone has posted before me to know I'm not copying someone else. It just seems wrong not to. It slows me down a lot. Am I the only one? I'm a pretty fast reader, but when there are 20 pages of people just trying to get points by typing a couple of words that don't have anything to do with the topic, it starts to wear on you.

Like I said before, I'm not putting Trap17 down; this is like my favorite site so far.
I guess I'm just a complaining Jew (no offense to all the other Jews out there, it's supposed to be funny.)

Well I know how you feel on the search thing, it sucks that you cannot search for anything less than three characters, but I guess it is for a good reason. And you should search around because you never want to mimic somebody else's topic. But, I like having a lot of topics, if there weren't Trap17 wouldn't be anything. Because of the wide range of topics available, it allows members to get more points because there are a wider ranger of topics, instead of just a couple. And if you do not like the topics here, there's Astahost.com which might have better topics for you.

Well the search problem is one that is found on every Invision Power Board - at every forum powered by IPB you cannot search for less than four characters.

And myself I don't read every post that is from a topic - it's just takes too long and if I say something that someone else said, so be it. Sometimes if I find a topic that I would like to post to, but I won't because of how many pages worth of replies it already has.

And the reasons there are so many topics is because it is a growing active community.

I don't think anyone likes the search being 4 or more letters. When they are 10 pages or so of posts, there's no need to read them all because they are probably about something general like, "What's your favorite color?" I like to read the recent posts on the bottom of the index page (or any other page). Since it's relatively new, there is usually very few posts already in the subject to read. There is about 20 posts per day so it shouldn't be overwhelming. Honestly, when posts are really really long, I tend not to read them and not to reply (due to laziness ). Try searching for a couple of minutes before you post, using words similar to the name of what your topic is just to make sure that it hasn't been posted. If you do duplicate a topic, the moderators aren't too harsh and you will probably get just a warning. Everyone has made mistakes on here, yes, even me!

Like you said, the moderators are extremely lenient to newbie members, so they give you a bit of room to make mistakes. But for members like I, who should know the rules then they won't give me that much room for error. And usually when searching to see if others have made a similar topic, you can occasionally figure out if a topic had been made before because of how common your topic title is. For example, if the title of your topic is "Which is the best game console" You can give the assumption that the topic has been made, but let's say your topic is something more narrow like "Does the megabox 800 have enough specs to run my clan" then you can assume that your topic is one of a kind, so use some basic knowledge and you'll be fine for the most part.

Like Smack mentioned, it's not Trap17's fault for having a minimum on the search. But i've heard to get "around" this problem, you can try adding an underscore (_) to make it reach the 4 character minimum. Not sure if this is actually useful, but it's worth a try.

I like all the topics; however, one thing I have found I didn't like is the tutorial section. All the tutorials go there and are unseperated. At astahost the tutorial section had subsections such as programming, programs, things like that. It would make it easier for people to find tutorials they are looking for. Just my input .

Well as for search problem I would say the best solution especially those who use google in your key words make sure to have +trap17 in your search and type all the words you want, of course you want be very specific, but thats a solution to the search.

Also a lot of these topics are repeats, I know a good size of these repeat topics have been found and taken care of over the past but as members don't just report spam if you 2 or more topics that are the same report them as well so as to organize the forums. So when people are trying to search they won't have several topics talking about the same thing and people repeating the answer over and over again.

t3jem that could be a good suggestion to bring to the admins attention, since the tutorial section is growing especially in the php area it could be a good idea to start sub grouping them.