Is It Helpful to Have Separate General and Q&A Forums?

[Jesse Jost]

Thanks all for the great input! ?Our plan has been to observe what works/what doesn't and make improvements accordingly. 

This site's main purpose is to provide a clean, peer-to-peer support community for CbB software. At the onset, we chose to err on the side of minimal, leveraging innate site capabilities like tags, Q&A, polls, quality search and activity features to round out a full experience without needing to rehash of the old forum structure. We didn't want to start from a bloated state, only to decruft later.

WRT to collapsing the Q&A and main discussion forums - the Q&A forum is the tool of choice for getting a distilled answer with minimal peripheral discussion, due to the voting and best choice features. In short, if you're looking for a "single best answer" to a specific question, your question is probably well-bounded and a good candidate for the Q&A forum. The Q&A forum is succinct and can be skimmed very easily, unlike traditional discussion forums, where topics can be open-ended and may tend toward more subjective matters. In reading through the topics and posts in Q&A and CbB forums respectively, having both seems to be making sense.

A few other things are resounding here - improvements to forum naming/usage direction, requests for some of the old forum sections, like hardware, software and techniques - all of which are under consideration. WRT the latter, I propose we try using the Coffeehouse as a go-to for _anything_ 3rd party or technique related, keying topics with use tags. Incidentally the Songs forum is getting really good traction, techniques for a given track can be discussed and tagged there, too. A reality of any discussion forum is that regardless of forum name or topic, discussions can drift, so a strict structure provides no guarantee of content accuracy, whereas tags can really help you zero in on areas of interest right away. Tags are super powerful! ⚡

Thanks for the ongoing discussion, it's a great way to help evolve these forums the right way!

[Sonarman]

I vote for merging the two. Btw, the old forum had better way to access My posts, recent posts, subscribed posts etc..

[Kamikaze]

I vote for a Questions forum, with an Answers sub forum.

[matt]

On 1/3/2019 at 2:36 PM, Toddskins said:

I agree that it's redundant and confusing.  We all look at the top 2 threads (starting from the Home page) and scratch our heads.

Have to agree with this.