Type of site Product Help Forum Owner Google Registration Required for posting | Available in Many available Commercial Yes | |
Google has several official help communities for most of its services, such as Gmail, YouTube, Blogger etc. Google help forums are officially called Google Product Forums. These help forums are a community of general users, who enjoy helping each other figure out the best ways to use a product.
Contents
History
Google started their user to user help communities named Google discussion groups in 2005 in Google Groups platform. In 2009, many of the official Google discussion groups moved from Google Groups to a new platform called "Google Help Forums". From the end of 2011 Google started to move back to a then much revamped Google Groups version. Google Analytics team posted in their blog post that the new Google product forums offer more stability and more features.
Community structure
Google Help Forums are mainly user to user platform where users ask questions and other users provide answers of those questions. Google claims, occasionally, Google employees participate in Google Help Forums. Besides official Google blogs, Google sometimes use Google Help Forums for important announcements. Anyone can join these forums and post questions and answers.
The most helpful and regular users of the community are selected as Top Contributors.
Some help forums provide some other tags for regular and helpful users (e.g. Rising Gmail Star in Gmail Help Forum, Blogger Addict in Blogger (service) Help Forum, Starred Users in Orkut Help Forum etc.