Doing an AMA using Discourse

Feature
28

Yes, I did one here at https://community.hackernoon.com/t/x/1800 and I have three sets of advice depending on who is asking:

For participants

Post the following guidelines early in the topic (either in the first post or the first reply) for people to follow:

  • Please only ask one question by replying to this topic a single time, using the blue Reply button at the bottom. It’s also helpful to scroll to the bottom while :open_book: reading the topic to make sure nobody else has asked the same question first, before you ask… right? :ok_hand:

    image

  • Please don’t ask more than one question, so everyone gets a chance :wink:

  • Please do not reply to anyone else’s post. The only purpose of replies here in this topic is to ask the author one question. If you’d like to discuss a related topic in more detail, create a new topic.

Posts not following these guidelines may be removed by moderators to keep the Q&A flowing smoothly. Thank you!

Two notes:

  1. The link to “the bottom” is in the form

    https://community.hackernoon.com/t/x/1800/last

    where you add the word “last” to the topic link, this will reliably take you to the bottom of the topic.

  2. The date and time of the Q&A can be specified in the first post using our automagic awesome localized-automatically date feature that @joffreyjaffeux created!

    [date=2019-04-08 time=12:00:00 timezone="America/Los_Angeles"]

    This way the correct date and time appears on the user’s browser, no matter where in the world they are. :date:

For answerers / authors

  • Make sure you’ve created your account on the site in advance of the Q&A as you’ll need it!

  • The answerer should create the topic (or the hosts can create it for them, and force ownership to the answerer via the wrench) so they get properly notified about replies to their topic.

  • :warning: MAKE SURE THE ANSWERER KNOWS TO QUOTE IN EVERY REPLY! This is critical. They have to quote the post they are replying to so people can see what they’re replying to and the conversation is properly connected. I cannot emphasize enough how critical this is… really. If this doesn’t get done, your Q&A / AMA is gonna suuuuuck real hard for readers. Basically don’t even bother if you can’t guarantee this part.

  • It is a bit of an advanced thing but some people don’t read the whole Q&A topic (although we did ask them to) and subsequently asked duplicate questions. In those cases I suggest editing quotes from those posts into existing answers so the answer then properly covers both questions. Users get notified when you quote them so this works, even when editing after the fact.

For hosts

  • Either grant the answerer moderator status temporarily, or have a moderator during the Q&A on hand to moderate anything weird that happens in the Q&A topic such as off-topic, angry, or rant-y posts.

  • Make sure the answerer has their account created and ready to go, and granted trust level 2 or higher so it avoids new user restrictions when answering!

  • Close the topic after the Q&A is complete, or set a topic timer to do it automatically.

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