Re:Discord Is Not Documentation
by mooreds on Sunday July 16, 2023 @02:18PM
(#36749986)
We've had great luck at $CURJOB with forum software. Definitely have had folks do their own research and mention forum posts when they ask questions of our support staff. We even have an internal slack channel where we capture questions that have been asked on other media (including private slack channels and github issues) and generalize it to post on the forums. This helps future questioners.
Forums attract SEO traffic, but are more middle of the evaluation funnel, when people want an answer to a question about a specific piece of software.
I think chat is great for companies, just not communities.
> Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless
It's far easier to drop a link to answer a common q and let the person read it than to engage in the back and forth to answer fully answer a question. You can always have the back and forth if the doc doesn't meet their needs.
Forums attract SEO traffic, but are more middle of the evaluation funnel, when people want an answer to a question about a specific piece of software.
I think chat is great for companies, just not communities.
> Yes yes, I know that many won't even touch the help portal/documentation and ask questions regardless
It's far easier to drop a link to answer a common q and let the person read it than to engage in the back and forth to answer fully answer a question. You can always have the back and forth if the doc doesn't meet their needs.