Latest Question vs. Latest Activity (and best answers)
Showing which questions have a ‘best answer’ or ‘accepted solution’ is a big commitment.
If you aren’t committed to individually marking ‘best answers’ at the end of each day to most questions, don’t display ‘best answer’ on your homepage.
It doesn’t look good if only 1 out of 20 questions seems to have an answer
One of our clients, Geotab, recently launched a new community and is doing this very well. Most questions do receive a best answer within a day and this appears on the homepage.
(click here to see image)
However, as the volume of questions grows this will become more of a challenge.
If 20 questions are posted an hour instead of 5 to 10 per day, each visitor will only see the list of new, unanswered, questions.
- You have three solutions here.
- You can remove ‘answered’ from being shown on the homepage.
- You can increase the speed at which you answer questions (and mark them as best answers).
You display posts by latest activity rather than latest question. Latest activity means older posts with answers are as likely to appear as new posts without.
When you’re just getting started, it makes sense to show the latest questions over latest activity. Once you’ve hit maturity, switch to latest activity and keep working hard to make answers as best/accepted.
