Source: Google Blog
For the last few years, the Google Help Forums have been a great gathering place for users, developers, and anyone else who has an opinion about Google or its products. We've been taking stock of what you have to say, and we've been impressed by the hundreds of thousands of people who really understand our products and are willing to share their knowledge. It's because of experts like the orkuteers, Google Apps Power Posters, Webmaster Help Bionic Posters and many others that the forums are a great place for getting quality answers, reporting bugs, offering product suggestions and sharing tips and tricks.
To make it even easier to get you the right answers to your questions as quickly as possible and to spot the most helpful commenters, we are converting our forums to a new system designed to help, encourage and reward everyone who visits.
Some of the features include:
[list=]improved search results, including posts from current and new forums
the ability to designate especially helpful forum members as "Top Contributors"
a reputation and ranking system
the ability for users, Top Contributors and Googlers to mark questions as answered
easier access to Help Center content
expanded user profiles that highlight your forum activity[/list]
A few products -- AdWords, AdSense, Android Market, Google Apps, Google Chrome and most of our Polish products -- have already switched to this system. Over the next several months, we'll convert more product Help Forums, initially in English and then in other languages.
If you have a question, bug report, suggestion, or just want to mix and mingle, we welcome you to "stop by" our forums. Googlers will check in from time to time to answer questions, listen to feedback, and highlight great responses and the people who provided them.
