Usefulnes of the "community" approach to tech help.

It sounds like you queried using the internal Search function instead of starting a new thread. That is most likely to get the results you report.

Starting a new thread is intended as the first-line approach to getting effective help here. Yes, we are all volunteers helping on a time-available basis, but most well-written questions get a personal response within 12 hours.

Another thing— only a handful of the estimated 3 million users here make the decision to stay and help. You are talking about 50-100 users who make the Apple forums their way of giving back.

A useful tool that Apple does not make easy to find is the forum site map. Might want to bookmark it so you cab see what topic areas have dedicated forums: https://discussions.apple.com/productsitemap.jspa

Understandable. Writing an effective Apple Support Communities question - Apple Community offers some suggestions on how to best exploit this resource, such as this one regarding Search.

Caveat: Beware that this support site does not sort answers chronologically by default. Check the date of the particular answer you find. If it's anything more than a few weeks old, its shelf life should be considered expired. If your initial search results reveal Discussions that have been inactive for ages, it's almost certain to be totally irrelevant. Keep searching. Available search options include sorting by date or relevance. Try both.

You posted in the forum titled "Earlier Operating Systems", so a suggestion from a post 3 years ago may actually be too recent for your query. If you have a technical support question, all you need to do is ask it and provide the OS version you are referring to. It really is that simple.

When I am thinking about an Earlier Operating System, I would expect to see posts about Mojave, Big Sur, Monterey, etc, not one that was released just last year as indicated by your tag line.

You may also need to be more precise in your phrasing of a question. If you ask something such as, "Why won't my Mac start?" that could be about any computer made since Apple began. In general though, if I need to ask a question here I start by carefully selecting which community I think may be appropriate and then just almost always ignore the suggested threads. Things change a lot and unless you provide information that specifies model and system versions then you may end up with outdated answers. We (and the automated systems here) only know what you tell us and we sometimes have to make assumptions or wild guesses if we are not really provided with much information.

jdkeene wrote:

Seems like a community in the tech arena that does not refresh itself frequently is pretty much useless. Just entered a query and the answers were over three years old...

I agree that you're more likely to get the best help for your specific problem if you ask your question. In addition to the fact that the forum search, well, leaves a bit to be desired, it may be that no one has asked exactly the same question about exactly the same equipment.

There is an alternative to the forum search that works better, with almost any search engine. Prefix your question with a site filter, for example:

"site:discussions.apple.com why doesn’t my Mac read my mind"

Samuel-F wrote:

It's pretty useful in fact, we helped thousands of users right here and learned a lot ! Sometimes we can't help but that doesn’t mean that we are "useless" !

Hello~ Agreed…well done.

~Katana-San~

Lawrence Finch wrote:

There is an alternative to the forum search that works better, with almost any search engine. Prefix your question with a site filter, for example:

"site:discussions.apple.com why doesn’t my Mac read my mind"

I use that so much for finding the right support articles that I reflexively start to type that when I search for anything!

Hello~ Do you have a technical question for us now? If you don’t find this community helpful as I do… simply stop using it.

~Katana-San~

It's pretty useful in fact, we helped thousands of users right here and learned a lot ! Sometimes we can't help but that doesn’t mean that we are "useless" !

FYI I asked that it be relocated to https://discussions.apple.com/community/using_apple_support_communities/