Freshdesk offers a wide range of Forum Types or templates you canuse to have different types of forum content.
For example, you can use a Question forum type to start a Q&A forum with your customers. Based on your business requirements, you can further customize it by adding user tips and how-to instructions, or start a discussion with workarounds.
Your agents can also use the Convert Topic to Ticket option inside the Forum topics to create a new ticket and link it to the corresponding forum topic.
The following table provides information about each forum type:
| Forum Type | Description | Tips |
|---|---|---|
| Questions | Start a Q&A forum, where users can ask questions and get answers from the community. Other users can upvote questions, saying, 'I Have this Question'. | Use this in your Q&A Forums, Tips and Tricks, and Discussions on workarounds |
| Ideas | Share an idea and start a discussion on the same. Other users can upvote the ideas, saying, 'I Like this Idea', and you can share progress on the idea, tagging the topic as 'Planned', 'In Progress', 'Deferred', 'Implemented' or 'Not Taken'. | Use this in your feature requests, product roadmap, and solutions |
| Problems | Share an issue or bug and discuss it with the community. Other users can upvote the problem saying 'I Have this Problem'. You can mark the problem as solved or unsolved and update it when the issue is fixed. | Use this in your Issues/ bug-report forums |
| Announcements | Share general announcements and start a simple discussion on this. Announcement forums do not have any voting options inside each topic. Only agents can make an announcement. | Use this for major product announcements, fixes, and release notes. |
You can drive discussions in your community forums with as many categories, forums and topics as you need. Each of your forums in Freshdesk have to fall under one of these four types:
| Forum Type | What it is | What's Special | Where to Use This |
| Questions | Question and answer type forum, where users can ask questions and get answers from the community. | Other users can upvote for the questions saying 'I Have this Question' | Q&A Forums, Tips and Tricks, and Discussions on work-arounds |
| Ideas | Users can share an idea and start a discussion around it, and agents can share progress on the idea. | Other users can upvote for the ideas saying 'I Like this Idea', and you can share progress on the idea tagging the topic as 'Planned', 'In Progress', 'Deferred', 'Implemented' or 'Not Taken'. | Feature requests, product roadmap ideas and solutions |
| Problems | Users can share a problem or bug and discuss it with the community. | Other users can upvote for the problem saying 'I have this Problem'. The problem can be marked as solved or unsolved. This can be updated when a fix is found. | Issues and bug-report forums |
| Announcements | Agents or users can share general announcements and start a simple discussion on this | Announcement forums do not have any voting options inside each topic. Only agents can make an announcement. | Major product announcements, fixes and release notes |
You can customize each of your Forums differently based on the above-listed types. For example, your Q&A forums, user tips and discussions with how-tos or workarounds would ideally be Question Forums. Similarly, if you are running a discussion thread to invite ideas, solutions and feature requests from your customers, you would want it to be an Idea type forum.
Your agents can also use the 'Convert Topic to Ticket' option inside the Forum topics to create a new ticket and have them linked to the corresponding forum topic.