Discussion Forum Examples: 5 Forums Worth Copying

Discussion forum examples, shown on a real site. This video walks through five discussion board examples: a help desk, a hobby club questions space, an ideas board, an announcements space and a knowledge base.

Transcript

Looking for discussion forum examples? Here are five, all running on one WordPress site. Each one is built for a single job. For each, you will see what it is for, how it is set up, and what to copy. Example one. A help desk. Someone asks how to get access to a server, and the reply that solved it is marked as the accepted answer. What to copy. Keep the answers where people can search, so the next person finds it and never has to ask. Example two. A hobby club. A running club gives its members a questions space of their own. Members answer each other, and the one who asked accepts the best reply. What to copy. One space for each interest, so a new runner sees running and nothing else. Notice what those two get right. One question, one page. The answer that worked is marked, so nobody reads the whole thread. And members help each other, which takes work off the people running it. Example three. An ideas board. Members post what they want and vote, and the owner marks each idea as planned, in progress or shipped. Example four. Announcements. The space is set so only the team starts topics, and news does not get buried under chatter. Example five. A knowledge base. Guides and best answers, collected in one place that everyone can read. So that is five forums and five jobs. Support. A shared interest. Deciding what to build. News from the team. And the guides. All five on one site, with one set of members. Three habits are worth copying from all of them. Give every space one job. Mark the answer that worked. And let members vote, then show them what you did about it. Building your own takes four steps. Install a forum plugin on your WordPress site. A short setup wizard asks where the forum should live. Create your first space, and choose its type. Then invite your members. All five examples are spaces on one forum. The owner adds them from the WordPress dashboard, and picks a type for each. And one moderation queue covers them all. Compare that with having no forum. Support happens by private email, instead of being answered once, in public. Ideas get lost in an inbox, instead of being ranked by votes. News is buried in a chat. And what your people know stays in their heads. Every week without a forum, the same questions come back, and the answers leave with whoever wrote them. Jetonomy is the free forum plugin for WordPress. Pick the one example that fits you, and build it this week. Get Jetonomy. The link is below.