Degree3 Q&A: Now in beta!

Who we are

Wouldn't it be nice if your visitors could easily find answers no matter where they were on your site?

If you don't answer your visitors' questions, someone else will. Over 70% of searchers who don't find their answers right away go right back to the search engine. Even for sites that people regularly visit, less than 15% bother to ask their question in the comments or forums.†

These are lost opportunities! Your site has visitors who could have answered these questions, and you could have answered these questions, but the opportunity was lost because the visitor didn't see an easy way to get answers.

We break down this engagement barrier by helping visitors feel welcome and confident that they will get answers, and we help you recognize your expert users, so they come back and continue to help you educate your community. People are naturally helpful, so let them help!

With a simple, one-step integration and moderation tools at your fingertips, it's the easiest thing you can do to educate and strengthen your community. Our mission is to help you help your visitors find and share answers, so let us know how we can help!
† AskYourTargetMarket Survey, July 2011

Our Founder, Joel Downs, pioneered social Q&A in 2003 with Answerbag.com, which was the first English-language Q&A site, and is still the third-largest alongside Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com. We have a passion for helping people find and share answers, and we want to share our experience and passion with you to help you help your visitors!

Why Q&A?

Degree3 is the next evolution of question-answering: contextual Q&A. We bring the power of contextual social Q&A to your sites, sites that have communities around specific topics, and help you harness the wisdom and experience of those experts to help new visitors, spur discussion, and reward your most faithful visitors..

The way that people find answers on the Internet has changed significantly since its founding. First there were Usenet newsgroups and distribution lists which were great, but the fantastic amount of knowledge that was shared was often lost in the Internet ether unless it was codified into an FAQ. Those FAQs were tedious to update, quickly became out of date, and were often lost themselves, so we moved on.

The next question-answering paradigm became comments and forums. Comments were versatile and easy, and contextual in that they were attached to specific articles, but they didn't help to create a knowledgebase of answers and weren't easily searchable. Visitors often didn't bother to ask questions because the comments were empty, because they were too crowded, or there was no way to validate the answers they received anyways.

Forums were effective at archiving answers, but they hung off the side of sites, so casual visitors didn't bother to register, and even if they did, there were not robust ways to determine which answers were correct. Visitors ended up asking the same questions over and over again, prompting many forums to resort to (you guessed it) manually-assembled FAQs.

Then there was social Q&A as popularized by sites like Yahoo! Answers and Joel's baby, Answerbag (the first English-language Social Q&A site, and still third-largest.) These general social Q&A sites served many needs because they gave quick answers, and the community could validate the best answers. The drawbacks to these sites were that they required you to go to a specific site to get answers, and the people who frequented those sites tended to be generalists and were not qualified to give answers in specialized topics such as, say, computer programming or digital photography.

Sites like StackOverflow evolved to address the lack of expertise. By aggregating people who were interested in a subject and willing to answer questions, StackOverflow found that the quality of answers was much higher than one would get by posting the same questions to a general Q&A site. While StackOverflow has done quite well in their niche, other Q&A communities have struggled because it's hard to get them started without an already-established community of people who are interested in the subject matter.

Degree3 is the next evolution of question-answering: contextual Q&A. We bring the power of contextual social Q&A to your sites, sites that have communities around specific topics, and that have subject matter experts who are eager to share what they know. We help you harness the wisdom and experience of those experts to help new visitors, spur discussion, and reward your most faithful visitors. We link your Q&A to specific pages on your site, helping your visitors find relevant answers when and where they need them, automatically creating FAQs, so you don't need to.

Download our plugin, and let us know how it works for you!

People, projects, and sites we'd like to thank

Emanuele of Wiki Prestiti for our Italian translation
Frank Barth for our German translation
Maysam Hossini for our Persian translation
Hicham Radi of Damarint for our French translation
Администрация of SocEngine.Ru for our Russian translation
Monkey for both of our Chinese translations
Mom for our Spanish translation
eLance
99Designs
Jquery
Head.js
PHPFeedWriter

Degree3 is dedicated to the memory of Tiger D