FAQ's

[RichardGaspa]

I am looking for a good FAQ system to be used with XenForo. I am constantly being asked the same questions over and over again from my new members. The help pages (and the contact link for that matter) to the right bottom of XenForo seem to be worthless as my members never seem to find them way down there in their current placement.

Anyone know a good FAQ XenForo Addon that I can download? I have been searching around, and the only one that looks good is FAQ Manager by Iversia 3.2.0. Any comments on this addon or do you know of one that is even better?

 

[Paul B]

If they don't click the existing links for the help pages, what makes you think they will click the FAQ links?

You can always edit the navigation template and add a link to the help page(s) there, if it's an issue of visibility.

 

[ForestForTrees]

To get people to click, I added a tab called "Help:"


It's just a direct link to a specific forum thread called "Frequently Asked Questions." The same thread is also stickied in the "About Us" subforum. The thread is locked and is just one big post.

The tab gets clicked on a lot. In fact the thread is our most viewed thread. That may have something to do with the fact that we are a nonprofit that serves people of diverse ages who often aren't computer savvy.

The thread itself uses a custom BBCode to create named spans (i.e. spans with id="" attributes) and a second custom BBCode to easily create links to those spans. Using these, we can create a Table of Contents or an index as well as "Back to Top" links. It may seem primitive, but people seem to really like it and I don't have to install an addon. Because it's just one big post, I can customize it to be whatever I want, so I like it, too.

The table of contents at the top looks like this:


To create the named spans, I use the following HTML replacement in the custom BBCode:

<span id="{option}">{text}</span>​

Don't laugh, but here's the HTML replacement I use to create the links to the targets:

<a href="http://www.mydomain.org/forum/threads/forum-faqs-frequently-asked-questions.1618/#{option}">{text}</a>​

It has a very obvious limitation, but it is dirt simple to maintain and doesn't have anything fancy that could get screwed up.

Using these two BBCodes, the BBCode associated with the above screenshot looks like this:



Pretty clean, eh? Maybe it's the programmer in me, but I really love minimalistic solutions.

Anyway, that's how we do it. I'd bet you want something fancier and that's cool, but this works quite well for us.

 

[RichardGaspa]

It's just a direct link to a specific forum thread called "Frequently Asked Questions." The same thread is also stickied in the "About Us" subforum. The thread is locked and is just one big post. The tab gets clicked on a lot. In fact the thread is our most viewed thread. That may have something to do with the fact that we are a nonprofit that serves people of diverse ages who often aren't computer savvy.

Thanks for the information. This will work just fine.