Atlassian Forums: Big-time upgrade
We’re excited to announce the general availability of our new Q&A site, Atlassian Answers.
Meta question: Why Q&A?
Q&A sites are popping up all over, and for good reason. Q&A sites have lots of advantages over traditional forums tools, including the badge systems and the emphasis on reducing duplicate questions.
We’ve spent a considerable amount of time developing a design for Atlassian Answers that we think hands down has one of the best end-user experiences of any comparable tool. Atlassian Answers is powered by OSQA, an open source Django (Python) application developed and supported by the folks at Dzone.
Retiring the forums
Answers will be replacing our Forums, which have been in need of an upgrade for a long time. Atlassian Answers gives us a fresh start on offering a great place for everyone in the Atlassian community – customers, evaluators, partners, the developer network, Atlassian user group leaders, staff – to connect and discuss what they’re working on or need help with (though Support issues, bugs and feature requests, all remain in Jira). The old forums will remain online and searchable, but all new conversations will be on answers.atlassian.com.
Karma, Karma, Karma
Answers employes a reputation system, called Karma, to incentivize users to participate in the system. Good answers and positive participation are rewarded with more Karma, trolling is rewarded with negative Karma. We’ve done a little something extra to reward good behavior: prizes.
Anyone that gains 1,500 Karma points will get an Atlassian Answers t-shirt (final design coming soon). When you reach 5,000 points, we’ll send you a Timbuk2 bag. For you overachievers, more goodies will be added soon.
We have already emailed the top 25 users of Forums to let them know that we’re giving them a head start on building up reputation points, called Karma in Atlassian Answers. Two users in particular need to be singled out because of their past (and on-going) contribution to Atlassian forums: Nic Brough and Neal Applebaum are far and away ahead of other forums users in terms of their massive contribution to the site. We hope that everyone reading this will become as avid of users.
Give it a try
You can start using Atlassian Answers by logging in using your my.atlassian.com credentials. If you don’t have an account, you can create one on the site. Check out Atlassian Answers and be sure to tell a friend about the new site.