Having another forum will absolutely fragment the community further. I’ve been around the Internet long enough to see it happen multiple times including a forum which I maintain. Facebook and Reddit are bad enough on their own causing fragmentation.
Those newbies will eventually become experienced users. Are they going to be kicked out of your forum and pushed over here? Probably not. Are they going to migrate on their own free will? Also probably not. I’m interested in helping beginners, but I’m not interested in joining yet another forum, and I’m sure others feel similarly.
There are ways this forum could work better with beginners. Having a beginner tag or something could be one way. This would allow the tag to serve the multiple purposes:
- Signifying to readers that this is a potentially newbie question
- Allowing people who just don’t want to deal with that stuff to completely ignore it, either explicitly by changing their user preferences to mute that tag, or implicitly by just scrolling past
- Enabling a group of volunteers who are willing to handle beginner questions to set their preferences to be alerted to these topics and jump in the conversation
- Adding another search mechanism for finding similar beginner topics
In the year since I joined here I’ve noticed other people newer to the forum (and some people who have been around!) engaging beginners in more friendly ways. And I say this as someone who engaged in some of the “combative” topics about some improvements. The problem mainly is lack of human resources in the community. There’s already a limited number of people in the community and some of them are the devs and maintainers themselves who quite frankly have better things to do than answer beginner questions ad-nauseam. But as the community grows, as it has in the past year, more people have been making efforts to engage beginners, including yourselves.
We’re already such a limited community. Please, please, please reconsider things that will fragment that community.