Need a free customer questions and answers support forum? Have a look at open source Discourse, Askbot, Vanilla and more

Where do you go when you have a question? Since humans began walking the earth, we've asked the people around us — our family, friends, neighbours, classmates, co-workers, or other people we know well. Much later came libraries and book stores offering knowledge and resources, as well as access for anyone to come in and search for the answers. When the home computer became common, these knowledge bases extended to electronic encyclopaedias shipped on floppy disks or CD-ROMs. Then, when the internet age arrived, these knowledge bases migrated online to the likes of Wikipedia, and search engines like Google were born with the purpose of making it easy for people to search for answers to their questions. Now, sites like StackOverflow are there to answer our software questions and Quora for our general queries.

The lesson is clear, though. We all have questions, and we all want answers for them. And some of us want to help others find answers to their questions, and this is where self-hosted Q&A sites come in.

Not only do these types of forums establish a self-help capability for customers, they can also help train your own staff as to what questions are typical and what the recommended responses are. All the systems covered in this linked article are open source and can be self-hosted so that you control the platform and the data. The article also has a short overview video which very importantly touches on how up to date the various solutions are.

See 7 open source Q&A platforms

#opensource #collaboration #customers

Where do you go when you have a question? Since humans began walking the earth, we've asked the people around us—our family, friends, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, or other people we know well. Much later came libraries and bookstores offering knowledge and resources, as well as access for anyone to come in and search for the answers. When the home computer became common, these knowledge bases extended to electronic encyclopedias shipped on floppy disks or CD-ROMs.

source https://gadgeteer.co.za/need-free-customer-questions-and-answers-support-forum-have-look-open-source-discourse-askbot