Answer - The Self Hosted Q&A Community Portal

If you are a small business or community and in need of a simple way to interact with your clients or customers, Answer might just be the tool you are looking for. If I had to compare it to something you might be familiar with, I'd say it's a pretty close competitor to Stack Overflow.

What is Answer?

Answer is an open-source knowledge-based community software. You can use it to quickly build your Q&A community for product technical support, customer support, user communication, and more.

Built on GO, Answer let's you choose 3 different types of DB options when first running the install. SQLite, MariaDB/MySQL and PostgreSQL. It's best to use a scalable DB such as MariaDB if you plan to have thousands of questions and use Answer as a mass community.

Install Answer using Docker Compose

This simple Docker Compose script will get you up and running in seconds. Once the script is ran, navigate to the install directory to setup the instance. http://localhost:9080/install

version: "3"
services:
  answer:
    image: answerdev/answer
    ports:
      - '9080:80'
    restart: on-failure
    volumes:
      - /docker/answer-data:/data

volumes:
  answer-data:

The installation will setup a few folders in the mapped data directory. If you chose SQLite as your database, it will create the "answer.db" file.

Answer Customization

Answer has quite a few settings to let you customize the branding, logo and other aesthetic options. However, there is no dark mode support quite yet. You can change the color of the top menu bar though.

Creating Questions with Answer

Adding a question in Answer is very simple. Just click the button and start writing your question. Answer has a built in feature rich editor that allows you to beautify your questions with formatting and even add images!

Answer SMTP E-Mail Notifications

Answer offers the option to setup SMTP details for enabling email alerts when questions are asked and answered. You can see this and many more settings within the Admin menu.

Answer Admin Dashboard

As the admin, you have complete control. Answer comes with a very well crafted admin dashboard giving you the ability to moderate all the questions and answers from one location as a birds eye view. You can change the the state of questions from normal, open and deleted. Here, you can also check any questions that may have been flagged by the community.

You can join our community that uses the Answer platform!

Final Notes and Thoughts

Answer is a great solution for feedback that promotes support as a community. You can allow your community to share their answers to questions allowing different perspectives. There's often times more than one answer to a question and Answer makes it simple.

Build your feedback portal with Answer and let us know how you like it!

If Answer interests you, be sure to give them a star on the Answer Github page!