Changing Existing Forum to 'Questions' Type

[John Brezovec]

I have an existing forum that serves us as a Q&A forum but is currently type 'Discussions'. I'd like to be able to change it over to type 'Questions' to get question/answer voting, but am concerned about the implications of changing the type. There are currently ~500 topics in the forum, what would happen to the existing content?

[teraßyte]

The content remains the same, the display of the posts simply changes to show an upvote/downvote option. Oh, and the ordering changes, too. The posts will be ordered by their votes by default instead of their date.

In case the order change is a problem, I have a free modification that sets it back to date.

[John Brezovec]

Thanks for your quick reply -- so it sounds like all that existing content will be marked as not having a best answer. So unless we would manually go in and mark best answers for all existing content, all questions will look like they aren't answered, right?

[Jim M]

6 minutes ago, John Brezovec said:

Thanks for your quick reply -- so it sounds like all that existing content will be marked as not having a best answer. So unless we would manually go in and mark best answers for all existing content, all questions will look like they aren't answered, right?

That would be correct. We would not be able to populate a best answer for you. That would need to be decided by the original poster or a staff member.

If the key point of switching to Q&A is to get "best answer" on topics, it may be helpful to switch on "Solutions" in your discussion forum. This allows replies to a topic to be marked as a "Solution" which is then highlighted at the top of the topic. It will still look like your previous topics don't have a "solution" but it's not as in your face as Q&A forums are. Just something to think about.