: What platform can I use to establish a users support forum? I was asked to develop a users support community forum for a small and young hi-tech company. This kind of forums is very popular

@Gretchen104

We have been using OSQA (a free software StackExchange clone) which is quite useful for public-access queries. (Note however that OSQA is not very actively developed, so AskBot might be a better choice these days.)

However, we haven't seen a lot of buy-in from our clients and partners, which may be related to our non-consumer industry, so they may not be used to using the public web professionally (in some cases, not even LinkedIn). So we're in the process of putting together a login-only bbPress forum, since our sysadmin suggested they might feel a bit more secure there (emotionally and technologically). We are planning to treat posts something like tickets, for example by encouraging users to mark them as solved, etc.

So the short answer is, the Q&A interface has incredible utility and I hope it becomes the norm, but if you find it doesn't gain traction with your userbase, a forum (possibly private) might be a better answer.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Gretchen104

A stackexchange style forum would be appropriate for this site (although there are many many other support forums out there). For a list of clones see this meta.stackexchange.com answer. The stackexchange model is designed around users helping users, but if your staff can take part then that's even better. If I were you I'd tweak the code so that users that are staff are clearly identified as such.

Vote Up Vote Down