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?

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 .

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.