AnswerHub Software

AnswerHub made it extremely to set up the infrastructure for a Q&A community, and it was overall a great experience working with them. Looking to the future, I hope they can modernize some aspects of the platform, including analytics, moderation workflows, the templating language, and API.

Pros

Easy to configure and customize for most Q&A needs. AnswerHub has very robust user and content management features out of the box (e.g. privileges, tagging, following questions, etc). The application can be easily extended through their API. Hosted and self-hosted options are priced competitively, and customer support is extremely responsive.

Cons

The built-in analytics are lacking and somewhat rudimentary. The question and answer moderation functionality could be improved, especially to enable more complex workflows. Finally, the API could be more stable and get more active development to support more use cases.

Pros

- Great customer support.
- Highly configurable (permissions, theme).
- Easy to make changes in the code yourself once you get the hang of it.
- Responsive to any screen format.

Cons

- No easy personnalisation via the admin dashboard though avdertised, you need IT skills, patience and curiosity to make theme / feature changes (minimal code documentation). Or you will need to go through professional services all the time.
- Few bug fixe releases
- Not regular enough new feature releases; we have had known bugs pending for a long time.
- Lack of moderation action logs ("post I have reported", actions taken by moderators etc...)
- Missing in-app notifications; there is only email notifications.
- Weak for knowledge base use (could use more tree-structure navigation and more wiki-style).

Pros

The software is extremely stable, we've found great flexibility with add-ons and community-driven tools, and bringing it into our domain has been fairly simple. The team at AnswerHub is also extremely helpful when working on user issues together.

Cons

At times I wish the moderation tools were more flexible on the front end. I often find myself wanting to do some simple account investigation or moderation, and it would be great if I didn't have to manually search the back end to do so.

Offers a feature often requested by our employees and customers, and does it in a way that is intuitive, quick and useful. The pricing is also reasonable for what our company needs.

Pros

It offers a strong set of capabilities at a reasonable price, and the company is good about responding to and addressing issues and questions with the product itself. I appreciate the extensibility of AH, and am glad to see improvements come to the product over time.

From an end-user perspective, it takes very little time to learn how to work with the system, and the gamification engine does help keep some users engaged.

The Q&A style of discussion offered by AH is also often a very strong selling point, both for customer end users but even within our company itself.

Cons

The company's professional services has struggled to be as effective partner with us as we need, causing delays to much needed functionality. Part of the issue is what I see as growing pains for the company, trying to grow it's customer-base while attempting, and not always delivering on the responsiveness they used to have. The tool's current reporting and analytics is somewhat rudimentary, and although I hear they are working on improvements, I'm still waiting.

Pros

making stackoverflow like functionality available to enterprise companies. very flexible and easy to customize, if you have the right skills available.

Cons

not enough bug fix releases, and to few regular new features releases in the last 18 month. operational support could be improved.

Gave a good appreciation of whats possible with such a tool

Pros

AnswerHub is fairly intuitive and easy to use. Those that appreciate the aims of the product embrassed it

Cons

Levels of privilege were faily basic. Would like to see more levels in order to spead the admin and functions.

No special benefits.

Pros

Functionality and features of the site are nice, the site layout is well done also, overall pleased with the product.

Cons

The reporting functionality is the greatest weak point of this software and needs some much needed love and attention.

Pros

Intuitive for end-users and pretty simple to use. We like the built-in rewarding system as it encourages users to use AnswerHub more frequently. UI is minimalistic and not cluttered with a lot of gadgets from the start.

Cons

Administration interface is totally different from the overall product look, some options are hard to locate or in places I wouldn't expect them. Some minor problems with search (queries don't always return what I'm looking for and I'm using exact words from the question). Can't override global notifications properties for all users but have to click through each one of them (I can do it for new users but not existing ones). Administrating privileges is quite complex and confusing at times until you figure out all the specifics (group-level, global, role permissions, ...). Can't get any logs out of cloud server except with help from AnswerHub - would be great if we could look at logs directly through administration (recent SSO problems). Minor bugs with shortcuts on Markdown editor which collide with shortcuts on our Slovenian keyboards. Advanced Analytics could be more user-friendly.

We are trying to put in place a knowledge base internally. This software enable us to do so and to optimize our way of interacting with it.

Pros

It allows a lot of possibilities, the support team is easy to reach and helpful, The principle of the Accepted Answer is very useful.

Cons

There is some customization works that are hard to made on our own and that complexify the daily use. The "Idea's" are not yet well implemented.

Pros

The interface is intuitive and easy to use. There are certainly a lot of features we like. For example, an user can control visibility of an answers. As an administrator, I can adjust points given to user actions.

Cons

Each time there is a software upgrade, we have to re-validate our custom theme and plugins. This hinders us from upgrading smoothly
Bugs in the current version don't get patches to be fixed.

Pros

Easy to understand format for users to ask and answer questions. And doesn't need much maintenance, so just keeps working.

Cons

Slack integration is poor, can just inform that a question was asked, and don't get additional notifications or interactions as more things happen. I feel if it had better slack integration more questions asked on slack could be converted into Answerhub questions and answers.
Plugin management is a little annoying, but very few people have to deal with that, so not too worried.

Pros

The software is very easy to use as an administrator and for users it is very intuitive so users can figure out what to do by themselves.

Cons

We need detailed usage stats and this area is the part where AnswerHub should improve most. There is an included analytics but in this age of detailed analytics it is unfortunately outdated.

It helps our support organization be more productive - customers can get their own answers, and support can post answers here too.

Pros

Very few products do this well. I think stack overflow is based on this product.
If you're support organization needs help to track issues and get help from user communities, or have user communities help themselves, this is the product for you.

Cons

Its a Java app. If something goes wrong, it takes a while to figure out the problem.
There have been times that other IPs have scraped our site and made it unusable.
Managing spammers is not ideal. But same goes for many other similar products.

Pros

Its easy to customize and easy to use. There are lots of modules, but we have not impelmented them.

Cons

Requires lots of customization. Every time there is an update, all the custom work that was done requires updates. I recommend out of the box use and limit how much you customize.

Pros

It was customizable which was nice. They also had a lot of features that we needed already built out so we didn't have to do it ourselves.

Cons

It wasn't easy to customize. The code sometimes was very hidden and we weren't sure if things were in a jar file or if they were in some other location.

Pros

Ability to define different spaces and target/tailor content to each space.
Ability to configure the different levels and karma assigned to people for answering questions.
Being able to subscribe to updates of posts so it's like an email/forum-based tool as well.

Cons

Administrative interface could be more user-friendly as it's difficult to understand various configurations.

Spam control could be improved as I can't find options to require approval of new users - we have many spam users sign up for our answerhub and need to go back and delete all these fraudulent accounts.

We moved a lot of the user's features request from a ticket-based platform, which is closed, to this open platform that is accessible for all users to see and participate.

Pros

Very customizable - for me, it's a plus, when the product is missing features and there are ways to work around it.
Good search, good support community, good support.

Cons

Some built-in items (kb,etc.) are implemented as plugins, which means you can't convert from one item to another.
We had to do a lot of customizations, for stuff we'd expect to be out-of-the-box (such as blocking users from posting before validating their emails).

Pros

Not many hiccups. It serves the purpose of Q&A community. It has easy to use UI. Fast and responsive and reliable.

Cons

Search is something that needs to be improved. Admin panel also needs some improvements. Not many updates and feature releases.

Our corporate level product forums are primarily based on functionality of this product, although we fail to take full advantage of its functionality.

Pros

I like any number of features that come with this platform including Space/SubSpaces, metadata grouping, the wide variety of email notification selections, and the flexibility of the formats.

Cons

I wish the new content list was formatted as Master/Detail instead of standard single column list. I also would prefer that there were more choices than just publish or delete when reviewing content as a Moderator. There should be a means of sending a Question back to draft status.

Finding solutions.

Pros

Ease of use. Hands down the most useful platform out there for managing a community and generating a truly usable resource for developers.

Cons

I wish collapsing long threads was simplified. But overall the most helpful thing would be having more users involved and using the platform.