Yep, it's been a long standing thing if you look through this forum that the advice given on FA could be found elsewhere and/ or the people should go to the doctor but, as said, we're not designed for anything but sign posting where people should go for general medical advice apart from giving the basics and this is what many people want and as Carmen says, a lot of people feel comfort in the justification that it is serious enough for a doctor or whatever. You could argue the same point with MH Discussion, people post in there asking for advice when really only their Dr/ a mental health professional in person can give that advice.
I'm not against re-looking at the FAF but email wouldn't work as well as it does for the supporters for a number of reasons (1 being that we have no clue whether the person behind the email is a RYL user or not and we only give advice to users) which is where the unified PM account would come in but this would potentially be one more thing to be forgotten and also you lose the forum feel of other users replying as there are times when all members of the team cannot get online properly for a couple of days apart from a quick check of their PMs. The FAF is by far not the quietest of boards, in fact though it may not always have a thread in a day of even a couple of days (compared to approx 4+ new threads/day in its height) but when you glance down the forum view it does usually have a much higher number of people viewing than any other, sometimes any other in total and I feel that must tell us something. People like the personalised touch which is why it's still going and as said, if not threads would just be posted elsewhere creating a larger workload (they still get moved to the FAF from SI/ SD/ GSA/ ED and occasionally MH to make life easier for users at the moment and so that will only worsen as people won't stop posting, they'll just post them elsewhere) and more threads will be missed. Everything in FA is checked by myself and/ or another member of the team even if we don't reply (as good quality user replies mean we don't always need to) but this can't be guaranteed if the posts are elsewhere which increases their risk of inaccurately and even dangerous information not just going to the member asking for the advice but a much greater number of the community and potentially members further afield.
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