Until recently we’ve been using a normal forum for public questions and answers from our community.
The forum model has two major drawbacks: it’s not easy to update information so the content can become obsolete quite soon and people can’t vote on replies so it’s sometimes hard to tell what the best answer to a question is.
This is why we’ve recently launched a new Q&A community site based on the stack-exchange model:
It has some great features like threaded comments, ability to update and vote on content and best of all it has user karma so we can see who really kicks ass (go Sean !).
This new model seems to be working much better than a simple forum so go ahead and ask any question about your hosting there and if you know some of the answers go ahead and improve your karma. You can also search previous questions and answers which can save you having to ask the question yourself in the Q&A site or in a support ticket.
As a side note the community site is an instance of the great OSQA open-source project which we’ve heavily customized by adding our logo at the top. Our old forum posts are still online but the forum is now in a read-only mode.
If it ain’t broke….. Can’t understand this decision, the forums worked well. I now have one place less to go for help.
@Shofty I can fully understand why they’re doing this. I reckon the Q&A model tends to work a lot better than the forum model for such a system. In particular with the vote system so that the most relevant answer ends up up the top – I’ve searched for things a few times and had to sift through a chronological thread to find a “link broken, try this now”, “this doesn’t work”, “updated information”, etc.
What’s more, I think this is even nice enough that I’ll ask a question on why I can’t get IceCast working on my account…
WebFaction: I like your “heavy customisation”. It wouldn’t be a proper WebFaction solution without it
The styles feel a bit blocky after StackExchange, perhaps you’ll do some theming of it.
Hey! It’s even Django-powered
I’m sold! (How didn’t I know about OSQA before!?)
And when it gets to the email confirmation message… now I’m sure OSQA is a good product. Any team with such a good sense of humour can’t help but produce good code!
Hi Remi, thanks for supporting OSQA and for providing a great hosting system. It’s really great to see this site running.
Rick