friendly suggestion for support staff

[el_ay_es]

This is not a support question, which is why I am not putting it in the support forum.

This is based on my past experience as a forum moderator for a big site of a different technical nature.

Newcomers happen along all the time, hopefully, and they have the same questions that others have had and that may have been answered previously.  I know from experience how laborious doing as good a job answering a  particular question for the 87th time as was done the first time can get to be.   I suggest that support staff might want to catalog some links to various prior answers privately so as to have a resource to use in answering current questions.  Rather than having to rewrite an answer or, even worse, ignore a repetitive question entirely, you could give an answer with one or more links to prior posts in the support forums.

[Slacker]

Yep, how true, welcome to the world of forums where eventually the same thing is asked and spoken of a 1000 times, hehe...

[hiozneko]

Users need to learn how to use the search feature. Forum will be forum. :3

[Reuben]

Hrm we do maintain a FAQ though.. I'll create a forum topic to link u guys to that FAQ.

[el_ay_es]

I'll create a forum topic to link u guys to that FAQ.

Of course making a sticky topic linking to the FAQ in the General Support form will do no harm.  But we who have spent some significant part of our lives in forums know that newcomers will still post questions.  And you do want to give good answers to questions to maintain your reputation for customer service.  My suggestion was about how individual questions might be answered both more efficiently and also very well. 

[Reuben]

How is that different from a FAQ? We just need to populate more questions into it yes?

[el_ay_es]

How is that different from a FAQ? We just need to populate more questions into it yes?

Putting a link either to the right section in a FAQ or else to a forum post where the question was answered previously is better than just answering, "Read the FAQ, idiot," which is basically what I assume you have in mind there.

In another technical forum with 15,000 members, we had a FAQ section.  We also had an indexed section of links to the best forum threads where various members had contributed on various recurring topics.  When newcomers posted questions, the moderators and other friendly members included those links in a friendly way in answering newcomers questions.  That was much more effective than trying to rewrite or summarize the entire contents of a good topic thread each time a newcomer asked a question.

[el_ay_es]

In another technical forum with 15,000 members, we had a FAQ section.  We also had an indexed section of links to the best forum threads where various members had contributed on various recurring topics.

The good threads that were indexed and grouped were not closed but remained active.  That special grouping in the forum meant those threads did not drop out of sight over time.  Members could add supplemental comments and questions to those threads but could not add new topics/threads to that special grouping.

[el_ay_es]

Reuben said,

We just need to populate more questions into [the FAQ section] yes?

On further thought, I failed to give enough attention to that, sorry Reuben.  Of course that would be good, and you could link to those questions and answers in answering newly repeated questions.  You could even expand and modify answers in the FAQ section as may be appropriate ongoing.