Apache Answer
Forums & communitiesA question and answer site for your community, customers or team.
Apache Answer gives you a question and answer site, in the style of a community forum, that you host yourself. It suits a public help centre where customers help each other, or an internal knowledge base where staff write an answer once and point others to it. Voting and accepted answers bring the most useful replies to the top.
- Questions, answers, comments, voting and accepted answers in one place.
- Reputation, badges, tags and revision history help run the community.
- Plugins add SSO, Elasticsearch or Meilisearch, S3 storage and Slack alerts.
What people use it for
Run a public help centre for your product
Install Answer with Docker Compose and use the web installer to set the site URL and admin account. Customers post questions in Markdown, other members answer and vote, and the person who asked accepts the answer that solved it. Tags group questions by product area, and members can follow the tags they care about.
Build an internal knowledge base for staff
In the privacy settings, limit registration to your company email domains and make content visible to members only. Add a connector plugin such as OAuth2 Basic or Google Connector so staff sign in with accounts they already have. Anyone can improve an answer later, and every edit is kept in the revision history.
Keep spam and noise out of the community
Turn on a reviewer plugin such as Akismet Anti-Spam or Review Basic so suspicious posts are held for moderators. Captcha plugins such as Basic Captcha or Google reCAPTCHA v2 add a check against bots. Admin, moderator and user roles decide who can manage users and content.