Top 10: Free and Highly Trafficked Q&A Communities

Just last week makeuseof covered ‘HowTo’ sources, extremely handy services listing thousands of all kinds of user-contributed ‘HowTo’ guides. While these services provide an excellent solution for all ‘HowTo’ type questions, they’re of little help when it comes to other range of questions, i.e. What … , Where… , When … , Why…. , etc.

And that’s what this post is about: popular and totally free Question and Answers (Q&A) communities where users can

1. easily post whatever questions they have and wait for community to answer, rate and comment on them
2. browse and search through thousands of already answered questions.

*** TOP 3 (Fast Answers, Guaranteed) ***

Yahoo!Answers – biggest, well-designed, highly-trafficked, feature-rich, multi-lingual (over 20 languages), community-powered Q&A service. More on Yahoo Answers

AnswerBag – yet another cool, well-trafficked Q&A community. Additionally to standard feature set provides an option to quickly rate (+/-) questions in order to make interesting ones standout. Higher rated questions, receive more attention and tend to get multiple replies in extremely short period of time, sometimes within the first 5-10 minutes after it has been posted.

QnA.Live - based on the user-activity it seems to be less popular than the above two, although as it originates from Live.com, the network still ensures decent amount of daily users. Doesn’t provide that many features but incorporates couple of most needed ones, i.e., RSS support for each question to easily follow-up on replies via feedreader AND an option to tag questions and browse them by tags (by category or popularity).

*** OTHER (7 more) ***

• TheAnswerBank
• Ask.Metafilter
• AskVille
• wikiAnswers
• Wikipedia:Reference Desk
• AllExperts
• NowNow

*** BONUS ***

Find ‘Answers’ – google-powered, custom search engine letting you instantly search for ‘Answers’ on all of the above mentioned websites simultaneously.