@phoebusg The admins have been working on the search for some time now. What we have now is a major improvement over what we had a few month ago. It just takes time to figure out what will work the best, but it’s something they are already working on.
As far as a tutorial, that would be nice, but in all honestly, I don’t think many people would use it. There are a lot of references to be found on Fluther if people take the time to look for them Reading through all the old blogs would show new users a lot of what’s happened to Fluther over the years, but it’s up to the individual user to decide if they want to do that. The “help” button at the top provides a lot of information as well.
As far as getting more people to use the active filter, once again, it’s up to the individual user. I prefer seeing the new questions that are posted on my homepage, so I like the way it’s already set up. Once I go through the newest questions, I look at the ones with the most recent activity. If a user doesn’t care about recent activity and only want to pay attention to the questions they are specifically following, they probably won’t use the active tab, just because they don’t see a need for it. We can’t make everyone go answer old questions or continue old conversations.
The main thing about it is that not everyone wants the same things out of Fluther, so there really isn’t a way to make it what everyone wants unless the admins made it so that we could customize fluther to fit us (such as setting our homepage and doing more to decide which questions show up in our “questions for you”). Some people prefer the conversations and the more social aspect of Fluther while others strictly want answers to their questions. There are a lot of people that post a question and never come back. It’s just the way of a Q&A site sometimes.
I understand what you are saying about off-topic chatter, but unless it is already rated in some was as being off-topic, the only way you’ll know it’s off-topic is to read it. Sometimes comments are a bit off-topic while also being on-topic. Hiding answers hides part of the conversation and can get quite confusing if you only see bits an pieces (just look at some of the heavily modded questions, it looks awful). We all have the ability to skip over the answers we don’t want to read.