Arun Vinoth @ Dynamics

Arun Vinoth @ Dynamics

https://arundynamix.blogspot.com

Forum vs Q&A sites

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People often get confused between these two sites. 

Forums normally allow members to discuss the problems, to & from communications, probably looks like chat many times. Over a period of time, future visitors felt they as a noise and less efficient when they are looking for a particular solution for their problem.

Examples: Dynamics community, User groups, Social msdn, Car repairs, etc

Q&A will be more efficient and hold value as an individual problem solving post, avoiding all the noise in comment level and answers will be predominant.

Examples: Stack Overflow, Quora, Stack Exchange, etc

When it comes to technical or programming issues, the leader is Stack Overflow. Due to their more stringent rules following elite self-moderating members - people feel unwelcoming. But that is the cost for quality.

Or else, it may soon become another wiki, right?

We have numerous blogs, quora, medium, YouTube channels, C# corner, etc, still we are looking for quality content to look back in need. That’s why even Microsoft recently rolled out a brand new .NET Q&A site recently.

Forum is like New York City, cross-posts allowed like jaywalk, can survive and find some useful solution in middle of chaos. Definitely we need different skill to get we need there.

Q&A is like F1 tracks, need to know the rules to play safe and complete the laps. Soon you will be master in business and without eye-soar everyone will get what they want.

From my early days of career, I used to access/contribute in EggHeadCafe, Experts Exchange, MSDN, etc. Still contributing in Stack Overflow, Dynamics community forum, Power Platform community, etc. I’m a moderator in few.

I like “Stack Overflow” bcoz of better Rules, Duplicates marked and avoiding waste of efforts, Artificial intelligence to catch sock-puppets and gamification, Worthy contributions, no cross posts, no plagiarism, no spam, reputation and badges, credibility, etc

One thing I concerned about is: people forming Buddy program and spoiling things, it’s everywhere in the world and in internet too - a faceless threat.

Q&A and Forums is helping me to groom my analytical, problem solving skills and also it’s like working in 20 different projects everyday. Definitely helping the community and future users for solutioning the problems in real world projects is not same as writing free form blogs and videos on HOW TO topics. It’s a different ball game.

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