When a community gets mature they have a challenge about questions. The challenge involves getting better questions and not necessarily getting more questions. Some of the challenges that have to be tackled all at the same time regarding questions are how to resolve repeated questions, how to resolve questions that have terrible headlines, how to analyze questions that are tagged poorly or not well categorized, or how to analyze the questions in which the details are very scanty that they cannot be answered. The author believes that when a community is mature, it should make it harder for members who are non-veterans to be asking questions and not easier. One good example of an online forum that is doing this is stack overflow. Before one can ask a question, he will be presented with a wizard or a traditional mode that takes that person through the process. Questions are categorized according to their categories and after one has selected a category, he is taken to a separate website for that question. This way the community filters a lot of questions that are bad for the community. Also the problem where members do not properly tag their posts is solved this way.
Key Takeaways:
- Community managers worry about the questions they get on their forum, not about the number of questions but about having questions that are quality.
- Some of the questions that pose challenges on the community forum are sometimes repeat questions, questions that have headlines that are poorly worded, and those with poor tags.
- Stack overflow is a good example of the model the author is promoting that it should be hard for non-veterans to ask questions on these forums.
“If you want to ask a question, you can either go through the wizard or traditional mode.”
Read more: https://www.feverbee.com/answer-questions/
