A forum that remembers

Chat is a good place to say hello. It is a poor place to keep an answer. A question asked on Tuesday is pushed out of sight by Thursday, and the person who has the same problem next month has to ask again. The helper who answered the first time answers the same thing again, politely, and a little less every time.

A forum is slower on purpose, and that is the point.

Answers that stay put#

In Community a question is a post, not a message in a stream. Replies sit under it. When one of them solves it, the person who asked, or staff, presses Accept. The accepted answer shows first and the question is marked answered. It does not scroll away.

Search that knows the side#

Search looks at titles, tags, authors and text, on one side at a time. A user question is not drowned in developer talk, and a developer is not offered how-to posts. It looks through the most recent posts of a side, which is more than enough today, and we say plainly that it is a limit. If the community grows past it, the search will need to grow with it.

Filters that help helpers#

Every channel has Latest, Top and Unanswered. Unanswered is the one that matters for a community that wants to be helpful: it shows exactly where a person with ten minutes can make a difference.

Calm reactions#

There are five reactions: helpful, love it, congrats, insightful and watching. There is no thumbs-down. A reaction is a way to say thank you without adding a reply, so a thread is still readable when you come back to it.

Tutorials with series#

Longer posts have a place too. A tutorial carries a cover, tags, a reading time and a series name with a part number, so the parts of a long guide stay together and are read in order.

What it is not#

Community is not a replacement for talking to a person quickly. It has no live chat. If you need an answer in a minute, this is the wrong tool. If you want the answer to still be there in a year, it is the right one.

See how questions work, or search the site.