Just a couple further thoughts about this, since you guys are re-thinking it:
If you really want people to get into the right sub-forum, why show a long list of topics in the first place? If they’re browsing, they’ll click an interesting-looking topic, and then end up posting their own question in whatever category they find themselves in (or append their question to an existing topic).
On the other hand, if they arrive at /support with the intention to post a query without browsing first, it isn’t immediately obvious that a category must be chosen first in order to do that.
An alternative:
buddypress.org/support perhaps shows a couple/few sticky posts, but the main content is a modified version of @modemlooper’s ‘When Asking for Support’. I’m guessing few people actually open that link before posting. For clarity, it might even be sub-divided into its troubleshooting advice, and the installation-environment probes.
I’d follow (or even precede) that with concise instructions on initiating a query by first selecting the relevant category from the sidebar list.
If there is a desire to just have all posts sorted by most-recent, just link to such a page. The /support page as it stands now seems to be geared for browsing.
To be clear, scaling the avatar is fine in my book. But it isn’t scaling, it’s squishing, which has a slimming effect on a member’s avatar so I suppose it could be considered a ‘feature’ 🙂
