Other than using newsletters, you can integrate Q&A software into your website that allows users who visit your site to register, ask questions, answer questions, etc. A good example is Quora which is the largest Q&A website. The software can come as a plugin or a theme. A Q&A helps customers submit questions regarding specific topics and search questions and read the related answers previously provided by other users.
In this guide, we are going to look at Answer which is an open-source knowledge-based community software. It can be used to quickly build a Q&A community for product technical support, customer support, user communication, and more. It is a Q&A platform that helps members with questions and boosts community participation. Members can upvote, contribute, and verify the correct information keeping the information up-to-date and trusted. It uses tags to organize questions and help contents into categories with a search to quickly find the answer making the knowledge easy to find for others.
Soon it will allow integrations to configure your community with your favorite services and plugins. This improves your workflow, makes your other tools better, or grows your community. Also, the platform will be gamified with reputation and badges so that members have fun collaborating and getting their work done.
So the main features of Answer are;
- Questions and Answers – Ask questions and get answers from your users and your team.
- Content Organization – Organize your content into categories and tags.
- Integrations – Integrate with your existing tools and services.
- Gamification – Reward your users for their contributions.
- Modern UI – A modern and responsive UI.
- Extensible – Extend Answer with plugins.
- Open Source – Free and open source.
Install Answer with Docker-compose
This is the recommended and quick start method to easily install and get started with Answer using Docker and Docker Compose. Refer to the article below on how to install Docker:
Now with docker and docker compose installed on your system, you can install Answer.
Use the following command install Answer.
mkdir ~/answer-docker && cd ~/answer-docker
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/answerdev/answer/main/docker-compose.yamlThen perform installation by creating docker containers.
docker-compose up -dThen visit http://your_server_ip:9080/.
Access Answer Q&A and configure
After you start the answer, you can follow the steps below to complete the initialization about the basic configuration.
Choose the Language:
Config database:
Apache Answer supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite as the database backend. The smallest environment is SQLite, which does not require any additional configuration. If you want to use MySQL or PostgreSQL, you need to setup the database first and then configure the database connection in this step. Here we recommend using sqlite3 to complete your first experience.
Click Next button to create the configuration file.
Fill in basic information:
Site URL is the browser address you will use to access answers after installation. If you are deploying a subdirectory, the site url needs to include the subdirectory’s path, eg: https://yourdoamin/{subdirectory}
Your are Done!
You can log in with the default administrator username: [email protected] and password: admin.
You can view your profile from the top-right menu and make any changes you want.
Once logged in, you can now ask a question. Click on the Add Question button, and enter the details of your question including the title and description.
Below the question, add a tag to help categorize the question. If there is no tag, you can create one. Enter the details of your tag and click Submit.
Then once the tag is added, post your question. It appears as below. You also have the option of answering your own question.
Click on Post your answer button. Then enter the details of your answer and click on Post your answer button.
The answer appears below the question.
Any answers posted for your question will send a notification which can be viewed under Notifications.
Conclusion
Answer helps you to build a community between your users and your team while providing a platform where you can share your knowledge and help your users to solve their problems. It has a modern and intuitive UI with an extended Answer with plugins. Not to forget that it is free and open-source software for use.
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