[Ken Leung]

Being one of the person came up with the idea of a Q&A forum, I've given a lot of thoughts about this through out the year.

Honestly, I think both side of the argument have good points.

If we let everyone answer in the Q&A forum:

Pro: Questions get answered as soon as possible.
Everyone get a chance to offer their help to people with questions.

Con: Threads could potentially get out of topic if some people doesn't treat it as seriously as others.
People can misdirect people with fake answer if they want to.
Rookie members might think they have the right answers when they are actually wrong.

If we only let selected people answer in the Q&A forum:

Pro: Questions are almost guaranteed to be correct.
The selected people will understand how important their responsibility is, and treat the forum seriously.
The threads won't get off topic as easily.

Con: People who aren't selected could have answers to the questions and couldn't answer it.
Generating the extra discussion make the question discussion very hard to keep track of.


So, I still don't know which way to go. Either we let everyone answer the questions, and have lots of moderators there to close the thread right away when there is a good answer, or we have selected group of people, only it is a very very large group of people.

Ideally I want to see the system setup so that everyone can post in the Q&A forum, but only the moderator's posts will show up, while all the others' are pending to be publicized when moderators approve them. Then we can make sure the thread stay short and clean, while everyone can contribute to it.


As far as having a qualification system for moderators... In the past we just pay attention to the forum closely, and figure out who have been really helpful in the past. We also listen to the selected moderators and see who they think should be added to the list. Just think, if every moderator suggest one different person, we will double the amount of moderators every time. I think the people know best when they spend endless amount of time in here reading through different threads.

Also, like a lot of people thinks, I really don't know the way the extra discussion turns out. It is very hard to keep track of the thread, because you never know if the responds are started in Q&A, or in extra discussion. If I have to choose, I would rather take out this feature and let everyone post rather than keep doing what we are doing right now.