Jim,
I disagree with you on this one. Myself, Minnflyer, and others have put a lot of thought and discussion into this subject before we decided to do it. If we didn't think it was worthwhile, trust me, we wouldn't be doing it. Yes, there are those out there that aren't going to listen to anything they read because they are "a special case". But those types aren't going to listen no matter what form the info is given in. A lot of times beginners in this hobby, and here on RCU, don't even know that there is a search function that they can use. And even when they do know about it the search and be a bit overwhelming. I just did a couple of quick searches and here is what I found. Searching on the word "training" returned over 500 results, "nexstar" over 500 results, "instructor" over 500 results, "PTS" returned 284 results, and even a search on the the word "thingy" (you would be surprised how many new people use that word) returned over 500 results. In my mind I thing it puts a new person off when they ask a question and somebody snaps back "that's already been answered, go do a search on it!" New people in this hobby are a little bit of a special case. A lot of times they are a bit overwhelmed by the whole hobby, and some do feel out of place asking for help. I actually trained a CEO of a multi-million dollar corporation and he gave me some great insights on this issue. He told me that it was very odd for him to be in the position of being told what to do, so he had some adjustments to do (actually, he turned out to be one of my better students). But the same thing applies to all new people. The Beginner's forum is a bit different from other forums on RCU in the amount of "crap" that we allow in here. Things that would be allowed in other forums aren't in here just because of the very nature of this forum. This forum can very well be a beginner's first look at the hobby, so we try to make that a good experience. We don't want them turned off of the hobby because they were treated badly in here. Sometimes it can take a beginner a lot of time to get up the courage to actually post a question in the forum, and we aren't going to have somebody slam them when they finally to ask. Also along those lines, as people are working up the nerve to ask they can sit back and read the FAQ at their leisure.

Another issue about the FAQ is that a lot of times a new person doesn't even know what questions that they should be asking. With a FAQ they can read through it and find information that they may have never thought of. We also want the FAQ to be a way of getting the correct answer. When a question is asked here in here in the forum the thread can go on for pages, and can sometimes have many different answers with a lot of those being just plain incorrect. With the FAQ they will get the right answer quickly. Lastly, since we will be answering specific questions we will make sure we can present all the material we can to answer the questions fully. This can be simple text, or text with pictures of the issue, or links to other sources, and lastly we will probably shoot quite a bit of video to go along with the text.

Ken