Q&A

What a Q&A room is

A Q&A room gives recurring questions a permanent home. Instead of the same question being answered in chat every few weeks, it gets asked once, answered once, and stays findable: questions are written in markdown, tagged, voted on, and closed with an accepted answer. It's the Stack Overflow model, private to your organization.

Add a Q&A room

1. In the space's sidebar, click + and pick the Q&A room type.
2. Name it and set visibility — open to the space, or limited to certain people.

Ask a question

Write the question in markdown — code blocks, lists, and formatting render properly, so technical questions stay readable. Add tags for the topics it touches; tags are what make the archive filterable later.

Before posting, check whether the question already has an answer: browse related questions and filter by tag. Every duplicate avoided is a thread that stays authoritative.

Answer and vote

Answers are markdown too. The team votes answers up or down, so quality is decided by the people who use the answers, and the strongest one is easy to spot.

When an answer solves the problem, the asker marks it accepted. Future readers see the resolution immediately instead of reading the whole thread — so if you asked, accept: it's the single most useful click in the room.

Find existing answers

The left rail has five views: Dashboard, All Questions, Unanswered, Answered and Most Voted. Unanswered is the one to work from if you are the person who answers things — it is the room's queue.

Alongside them:

• Tags — narrow the archive to a topic. The sidebar lists the most-used tags and the questions still waiting for an answer.
• Related questions — shown as you browse, surfacing existing answers before a duplicate gets posted.
• Search — over the room's questions.

Mark duplicates

When the same question arrives again, mark it a duplicate of the original rather than answering it twice. The thread stays, pointing at the canonical one, so both search terms lead to the same answer. Unmarking it undoes that, if you decide the two questions were not the same after all.

Follow a tag

Subscribe to a tag and you are notified when a new question is asked with it. That is how the person who knows about deployments hears about a deployment question without watching the whole room.

Reputation and the leaderboard

The room keeps a reputation score per person, counted from this room alone:

• An upvote on your question or answer is +10.
• A downvote is -2.
• Having your answer accepted is +15.

A score never goes below zero. The sidebar's Top contributors panel ranks the room's ten highest.

Reputation is per room and per Q&A. It is a way of showing who has been useful here, not a company-wide score.

Use the analytics dashboard

The room's analytics dashboard shows what gets asked and answered. Frequently asked topics are an honest map of where your documentation is thin — use them to decide what to write up properly in a Docs or Wiki room next.

Tips

• Seed the room: post the ten questions your team answers most often, with their answers, before announcing it. An empty Q&A room doesn't attract questions.
• Agree on a small tag vocabulary early; a dozen consistent tags beat a hundred one-off ones.
• Make "search Q&A first" the norm for new joiners — it's faster than a DM and the answer stays for the next person.
• When an accepted answer goes stale, post a fresh answer and vote it up rather than leaving the thread misleading.

FAQ

Why not just answer questions in chat? Chat answers scroll away and get answered again next month. Q&A answers are tagged, searchable, voted, and marked accepted — written once, found forever.

How do we keep quality high? Voting surfaces good answers and sinks weak ones; accepted answers mark the resolution; tags, related questions and duplicate marking cut down repeats.

How is this different from a Discussions room? Q&A is one question, tags, votes, an accepted answer and per-room reputation. Discussions is threads — categories, replies, reactions, pinning and closing — and it can be run as a question board too. Pick the shape your team actually uses.

Is our Q&A content private? Yes. The room lives inside your space under Openbook's roles and per-room visibility, so you control exactly who can see and participate.

What does the analytics dashboard show? Activity across the room — what people ask about most and how questions get answered. Use it to spot knowledge gaps worth documenting.