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Online Q&A Forums: One stop solution for programmers

Online forums

● An online forum is message board, online discussion group or you can say web forum.

● In other word you can say that an online forum is a discussion area on a website whereby members can post questions, read and respond to any post which is posted by other forum members.

Characteristics of good online forums

● There must be thread based discussion for questions and answers.

● Can have an options to comment on an individual thread.● There must be options to filter questions.● There should be analyzed reporting of members activities.● Options to have grade UP/Down questions and answers.● A good community forums must have moderators to cleanup

forums.● Tag based management of questions which helps to

categorize questions in good manner.● Should have gamification concept on special occasions to

attract community members.

Characteristics of good online forums

● Easy interface to ask questions and post answers and good option to format questions and answers.

● There should be reward options in form of badges on good achievements of members.○ 1 Gold badge for Up vote 100 questions or answers.○ 1 Silver badge for edit 100 poor quality questions or

answers.● There should be options to grant privileges on each

milestone.○ Members can edit others post after crossing 2000

reputation.○ Members can create tags after crossing 3000 reputation.

Characteristics of good online forums

● There should have an option to highlight questions on main board called BOUNTIES, questions should be decided by members. Which attracts other members to post an answers for that questions.○ Bounty defined by user, for that they have to pay

reputations, which will be transferred to member which gives correct answer for that question.

● There should have an option to raise flag for questions or answers to determine and update the quality of posts.

Benefits to participants in good online forums

● Forums rarely turn into hated arguments because people get enough time to research and considering their comments before replying. This will make high quality discussion.

● Forums like stackoverflow gives option to build your professional CV.

● By interacting on forums you don’t meet a person face to face but still you are helping each others in community.

● You can save your development time by implementing ready solutions rather than building logic from scratch.

Benefits to participants in good online forums

● You will get platform to share your knowledge as well as to judge yourself.

● You can judge your knowledge by giving answers.● You can improve your knowledge by involving yourself in

forums.● Lots of questions are ready to learn (assignments on hand).● You can easily learn many things from others questions and

it’s solution.● You can define filter for questions of your favorite tags,

though you will always get questions of your interest, you will be notified via email as well.

Benefits to participants in good online forums

● You can create your unique identity by involving yourself into forums and create better reputations by giving good answers and asking good questions which other members vote up. Even Though you will get badges as a reward of your contribution in community.

● Your reputation and badges will helps you to get better opportunities for job and business, because nowadays IT companies post requirements on forums like stackoverflow, as well as clients directly looking for companies/resources who performs well on community on particular technologies which they wants.

Benefits to participants in good online forums

● Your skills will be improved gradually by asking good questions on community, because community have selected moderators to cleanup community as well as to maintain quality though you have to ask a good quality questions.

● By giving continuously answer on forums, your skill of understanding requirements or need of questioner will be improved gradually which will help you a lot in field. Because you need to give answer dedicated to questions so that you must be totally aware of his problem.

Benefits to participants in good online forums

● You will get multiple solutions for your problems, you need to judge better option among them and suitable to your conditions, that means which solution is easy to implement and effective as well.

● You can judge yourself by doing analysis on account details where you can see your performance ratio of your contribution toward community.

Best forums example

● Stack Exchange (Group of forums)○ More than 5 million active community members○ More than 50 active forums

■ http://stackoverflow.com/■ http://dba.stackexchange.com/■ http://academia.stackexchange.com/■ http://magento.stackexchange.com/

○ 11,251,837 tagged questions (more than 1.1 crore)

Thank You

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