If you want to add an interactive section to your website, where your visitors can post content and have other visitors respond to that content, then there are a few different solutions that could help you achieve this.
One popular option could be to add a discussion forum to your website, while the other option could be to add a question and answer section. While these two modes of discussion do share many similarities, they are also different in enough ways to make them better suited than the other, for use in certain scenarios.
In this post we will help you decide whether a discussion forum or a question and answer section would be a better addition to your website. We will also cover two of the best plugins available for adding either option to your WordPress website. By the end of this article you should be ready to get started and add the right type of discussion area to your website.
The Main Differences Between Forums and Question and Answer Sections
As the name suggests, the question and answer feature is best suited to giving your visitors the option of posting questions on your website, which can then be answered by you, or other website visitors. If you run a support website for a product or service, a Q&A section is a great way to help your users.
While a discussion forum can work in this way too, a forum can be used in many other formats besides just questions and answers. However, due to their more flexible and free flow nature, a discussion forum is often better suited to building a community around your website, where users can share their thoughts and collaborate, as well as asking questions related to the problems or dilemmas they face.
One important differentiating factor, is that question and answer tools usually include a feature that will help the best answer for each question emerge from all the user contributions. These features include voting, as well as the ability to mark a single answer as being the correct solution to the problem.
By allowing your visitors to upvote answers, the majority opinion can help the question asker decide which answer to accept and which advice to follow.
There is plenty of overlap between forums and Q&A tools. However, roughly speaking, if you want to engender more flowing and organic discussion on your website then adding a forum is the better option. On the other hand, if you want to allow your visitors to post a question, and then receive a definitive answer, then adding a question and answer section to your website could be the best option.
The Best Forum and Q&A Plugins for WordPress
Hopefully now you’ve got a good understanding of the main differences between a forum and a question and answer feature and you are now able to choose the right option for your project.
To help you pick the right tool, which can help you implement either a discussion forum or questions and answer feature on your website, we are going to take a look at some of the best options available to WordPress users.
First we’ll start off by looking at the best forum plugin for WordPress, before moving on to the best question and answer solution.
bbPress: The Best Forum Plugin for WordPress
bbPress is a free plugin that has been created for adding discussion forums to WordPress. If you want to build a vibrant community around your website, then there is no better option than the bbPress plugin.
This tool has been built the WordPress way. This means it integrates seamlessly with WordPress and the admin and setting pages of the plugin will look, work, and feel like a core part of the WordPress software.
All the external functionality of the plugin, such as its discussion forums, will take on the appearance and styling of your chosen WordPress theme. This helps you to deliver a consistent user experience across all the content on your website, from your blog, to your product pages, right through to the discussion area.
Another reason why bbPress is the plugin of choice for many WordPress users who want to add a discussion area to their website, is the large number of add-ons available for it. That’s right – the bbPress plugin has its own plugins. Like bbPress itself, many of these add-ons are free to use, although there are some premium options available.
The add-on model is great for allowing you to keep your website as lightweight as possible by using the core plugin, and then adding on any additional features as you need them, via the add-on modules.
Recommended bbPress Add-ons for Enhancing Your Discussion Forums
As mentioned earlier, choosing bbPress gives you access to a growing library of add-ons. These plugins have been built by the developers of bbPress, as well as third party coders.
GD bbPress Tools is a handy free add-on that gives you the ability to add a great selection of useful features to your bbPress-powered discussion forum. Some of these features include BBCode support, user signatures, reply with quote functionality, and a few other upgrades.
The GD bbPress Attachments plugin from the same developers, gives your members the ability to upload files to discussion forum topics. When using this add-on, you get access to a detailed set of controls to ensure your visitors are using attachments responsibility on your website.
bbPress Topics for Posts is an add-on that should be able to help drive more of your blog readers towards your discussion forums. With this add-on enabled, each new post on your blog can now start its own discussion thread in your forum. Any replies that the thread generates will be displayed under the post, replacing the default comments functionality.
bbPress Private Replies is a simple an add-on that has some useful applications. By installing this plugin, your forum members can mark their forum replies as private. The effect of this is that only the person being replied to (and the forum moderators) can view that reply. If you want to make it safe for your users to share sensitive information, then this free add-on can help you out.
bbPress Report Content does as the name suggests, and makes it easy for your visitors to report content that is posted to the forums. Any flagged or reported content is then brought to the attention of the moderators, who can then inspect it and take the appropriate action.
Basic User Avatars gives your members another option for displaying their profile photos, other than using the Gravatar service. With this add-on enabled, your users can upload their profile photo directly to your site. The image file is then stored on your server, and displayed as part of the user’s profile.
bbPress Notify adds email notifications to your forum. This is an essential feature for helping to keep the discussion going on your website. Now, if your users opt-in, and depending on their preferences, they will receive an email notification each time someone posts a new topic or replies to an existing one. The plugin includes enhanced spam filtering to avoid your members receiving unwanted email notifications.
Some of these add-ons might seem like they are adding seemingly essential discussion features to bbPress, and in a way, that is the case. However, this helps the developers of bbPress keep the core plugin as lightweight as possible, while also giving users the ability to pick and choose which upgrades they deploy to their website.
How to Add a Discussion Forum to a WordPress Website with bbPress
As the bbPress plugin is free to use, it can be installed on your website directly from the WordPress plugin directory. After logging into your WordPress admin area, navigate to the Add New Plugins page and search for bbPress.
After activating the plugin, you should then head over to the bbPress settings page. This gives you the ability to configure your discussion forums to work in the way that you want. It’s worth spending some time here to decide how you want your community area to function.
Once the plugin has been activated, the discussion forum areas on your website can be found at http://www.example.com/forums/. However, you will first need to create some forums before the discussion can begin.
bbPress uses the WordPress custom post type feature to manage the discussion content, such as the topics and their replies. Once bbPress is running on your site, you should notice three new post types have been added to your admin sidebar menu: forums, topics, and replies.
While the discussion forum content can be created by your users from the front end of your website, you will need to create at least one forum first. Doing so is very easy, and only requires you to add a new forum from the admin area of your website.
On the back end, bbPress gives you some options when creating a new forum. This covers its visibility, its status, and if it’s actually a new forum or is instead a category for organizing your forums. Once you’ve created a new forum, you should be able to see it on the front end of your website.
Now your registered users can click through to that forum and start creating new topics. After that, other users can begin replying to those topics. As they do so, you can then manage those items through the back end of your website.
bbPress makes it easy to add multiple discussion forums to your website, and by doing so, you can help organize your forum content more effectively. As you and your visitors create more content on your forums, you can keep on top of it from the bbPress pages on the back end of your website.
From the Forums screen, you can view the different top level discussion areas, as well as any sub-forums you’ve created on your site. bbPress makes it very easy to moderate and administrate your discussion forums from the back end admin area of your WordPress website.
By using some of the optional add-ons for bbPress that we covered earlier, you can really enhance your forum to make it more useful for your visitors, as well as making it easier to manage on your part.
DW Question & Answer WordPress Plugin
If you think that a question and answer section on your WordPress website would be a better fit, compared to a discussion forum, or maybe you want to add both options to your site, the free DW Question & Answer plugin is a great choice.
This free tool has been installed on over 10,000 WordPress websites. It’s also managed to rack up 43 five star reviews which has resulted in an overall user rating of 4.4 out of 5, helping to demonstrate this is a plugin you can trust to power the Q&A section on your website. There is also a free optional add-on titled DW Question Answer – Embed Question. This add-on makes it easier for you and your visitors to share your questions on social media.
How to Add a Question and Answer Section to WordPress
As the DW Question and Answer plugin is free to use, it can be installed on your website, directly from the WordPress plugin directory. After doing so, you can then access the functionality of the plugin from the newly added DW Q&A sidebar menu on your website’s admin area.
From this menu, you can access the plugin settings to configure how the Question and Answer section of your website will work. Through the settings page, you can change things like which pages the plugin should use to display its content, how many questions to show per page, how to protect your question and answer board from spam, and a few other useful options.
During the installation of the plugin, two new pages will be created on your website. The purpose of these pages is to list the questions that have been posted on your site, and display the form that allows your visitors to ask a question of you and your readers.
As these pages use shortcodes to display their content, you are free to choose alternatives. However, for most users the defaults should be fine.
Now when you or your visitors access those pages, they can see all the questions that have been posted.
If a visitor want to ask a question, they can simply access the relevant page, and use the form to submit their query.
Now you or your other visitors can answer those questions. The features of the plugin allow visitors to either answer a question or leave a comment. They can also vote on answers to help pick a winner from the contributions.
All the user generated content can be managed from the admin area of your website. This makes it very easy to administrate the question and answer section on your website.
Conclusion
Hopefully now you know the main differences between discussion forums and question and answer sections. You should now also be able to accurately decide which one of these two options is the best choice for your website, or whether there is a place for both of them on your site.
When you do make a final decision, the two above guides covering the bbPress discussion forum plugin, and the DW Question and Answer plugin, will show you how to add those two features to your WordPress website.
If you have any questions about this topic, of using WordPress in general, please leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you.