efficacy of forums

[Simon Butcher]

I have used forums for many years. For some things (e.g. discussion for regular visitors) it works OK.

However,for many uses forums have been used just because there has been no better options. For example, for the following uses:

1) Q&A

2) tips

3) suggestions from the community

4) market research and testing popularity of ideas

5)"reward based" system

6) disseminating information

7) discussions featuring up to date information

then forums don't work that well. for example (6) some android forums (xdadevelopers) have threads that run to 250 pages. somewhere on page 175 there may be the nugget of information you require. other posts may contain outdated information or incorrect info, and you have to read them all, page 224 might have a post that negates what you thought was the correct answer on page 174. 

forums don't really allow for popular or correct ideas to bubble up the top. Having the ability to see what is the highest rated answer is a great help when trying to sort out the noise.

forums don't often make it easy/encourage original posts to be developed and improved in-place, certainly not by others

duplicate topics appear on forums and need heavy curating if they are not to become messy. merged topics are hard to understand

forums generally have a lot of "me too" type posts

correct and insightful posts within a thread have equal weighting to others within the thread

besides pinning, insightful and important posts have equal weighting to others. this topic might not get noticed at all

the solution to a lot of these issues is a site that allows upvoting, "rewards" (points for good answers/posts), and downvoting of irrelevant info. a site like http://stackexchange.com for airfix/modelling community could become a great knowledge base in quite a short time, given sufficient buy-in from the community (could also offer prizes for top monthly contributors). many of these stackexchange sites (eg.. http://askubuntu.com ) have become the go-to source of all technical questions and tutorials, and top hits on google. the good thing is that particular questions are upvoted (e.g. how do i thin paint for airbrushing? what sort of airbrush should i buy? what vehicles can i buy in 1:48 for a battle of britain airfield diorama) and multiple answers can be posted, and the most popular and accurate bubble up to the top, meaning you get a reliable and current information source. in time, if the information changes, then new answers are posted bubble up to the top and incorrect ones are downvoted, etc. also you can have the notion of "accepted answer", so you know that the person who posted the question tried and liked the solution.

also, this has uses for sourcing ideas from the community for new models, or kitstarter models (which has a really messy and franky useless suggestion forum at the moment). a stackexchange would make it easier to upvote ones you like and downvote suggestions such as kitstarter for a lightning kit when airfix has a great new tool already.