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It sounds like the author was mostly thinking about INTERNAL discussion, but I think the real tragedy is in using chat like Slack for your public customer community forum.

Think of all the knowledge and employee-time locked away in the scrollback of a chat based community forum.

Better to have chat for informal community discussion, but when someone asks a question that others in your community might find useful in the future, politely direct them to post it in a more permanent (read: accessible via google search) medium.



My experience so far with companies that operate in this manner, has been something like:

1) Community member asks question.

2A) Answer is already in documentation, which can be easily linked to.

Or

2B) Can be answered in-line, with an action item to add clarification/more details to the docs.

This feels like a pretty scalable solution for the most part. If there are still recurring questions you might want to look at the discoverability/layout of your docs, but usually I've found that other community members start linking each other to docs if the same question comes up again and again.




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