I’m not feeling very comfortable by the idea to put as much as possible in the forum, as I still see the primary usecase for a forum is discussion, mainly “User X helps User Y” and discussions about how to improve the product. I have thought of several options how to share it, but still not sure what the best option is and what’s technically possible. It’s probably also a good idea to add a link to the pdf manual at the beginning of each post, mentioning that what follows is an excerpt of that manual. copy and paste each section (or sub-section) into a new topic here on the forum to make it searchable.

So, in other words, I see the manual as a structured/guided access path to the forum. One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that linking from the pdf to the respective forum topic would be another plus (like: For further information on this, see ). That is why I strongly argue for making all support information searchable here on the forum.Īnd I would argue that duplicating the pdf manual on the forum is also a goid way of keeping the manual updated and incrementally improving it because if there is something that users don’t understand or that no longer seems to work, they will comment/ask on the forum, thus making that information immediately available to everyone and whenever someone takes the time to update the pdf document, they can just look through the comments on the forum to find those points that need updating.

I have also argued against a knowledge base type “manual” because it requires a lot of work to maintain, plus: we would then have two (or three, if a pdf version also exists) separate support locations. Personally, I would not invest the time for making an old school manual (pdf) but I appreciate it if it exists. It depends what kind of manual you want to offer to users and, importantly, how much time and effort do you want to invest in producing and maintaining it. I think for maintaining the manual its easier to do it from a descent system, a forum isn’t really the tool for documenting a manual.

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