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


henkejs

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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!

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