There comes a point in the life of any successful community when users start asking the same questions regularly. Typically, at this moment, the community management team faces the following question:
Which questions should go to the help center and which should be covered in community-curated FAQs?
Let’s try to figure this out.
What is a help center?
The help center is an official knowledge base maintained by the company (employees, admins or moderators). It functions as the primary source of documentation for the project and usually covers fundamental features and rules of the community.
The goal of the help center is to onboard new users, explain the core principles such as what topics are on-topic/off-topic and provide a formal guide on how the community operates.
From my personal experience, excellent candidates for the help center would be:
- Articles that explain system design decisions (that is, why it works the way it does)
- The core rules and norms of the community.
- Questions that do not have a consensus in the community, and you’ve decided that one of the solutions is worth pursuing.
What are community FAQs?
Community FAQs are a set of posts that are collaboratively maintained by the community to supplement the official documentation. All the content of community FAQs is created, edited, and refined by users through a collaborative process. Usually, community FAQs address the nuances of the rules and norms of the community, as well as solutions to highly specific issues that may not be covered in the help center.
Because community FAQs are community-editable, they can be updated faster and more easily than the official help center to reflect current discussions and consensus.
I think questions like “Is it okay to do X?” and “How can I do Y?” are great candidates for community curated FAQs.
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