The current forum serves two purposes:

1. Technical Support
2. Product Feedback and Discussion

Forum software are optimized for discussions and not for technical support or product feedback. What is optimized for these are:

1. Q & A software
2. Issue Tracking software

Because of that and network effect:

1. Stack Overflow is the defacto place for quality Q & A.
2. GitHub/Bitbucket etc. are where developers expect to give feedback, right next to where the code is.

My recommendation is to:

1. Put the ASP.NET forum into read only mode.
2. Move all current support staff to answer Stack Overflow questions to ensure quality and accuracy.
3. Encourage and direct product feedback and discussion to the respective ASP.NET GitHub repository.

I used to be more active on the ASP.NET forums, but since the launch of Stack Overflow and the shift to "develop in the open", as a developer, I derive very little value from ASP.NET forums.

When searching for something, I ignore results that take me to ASP.NET forums unless the usual places don't have an answer.

1. Code Implementation

Direct implementation of the code using few different kinds of editors should available on Asp.Net Forum. So that user can directly write the small line of the code and execute it and share it.

2. Comment System

One Comment section should available on every answer as well as question, which must not be mark as answer. It should be only for better understanding of the question or answer or getting the more info regarding the issue.

3. Option to Vote for Answer

There should be a “Thumbs UP” option for every answer where user can vote for the answer and the answer which get more vote should be appear on the top. It will create the trust on the answer as well.

4. Improve Search

Search functionality should enhance and after search it should be give the related query as like stackoverflow.

5. Option to Upload

There should be also an option to attach code as zip file. And also provide the limitation of the zip file size. Mostly it helps for fresher developers.

6. Tag to some specific developer

If anyone wants to tag to some other developers to give the answer it, then this functionality should be there.

7. Upload local Image

There should be a functionality to upload the images directly from there system only with some specific format.

I hope this functionality should be added in this forums.
Thanks

I cant even count the number of times I have been reading about something and tried to dive in and explore only to later learn that the demo/tutorial/example is not compatible with my dev environment. One great example is SignalR when it was first released. Then there were updates that were not compatible with earlier demos. The same holds for Q and A in the support area. Its really tough to get the vitals up front. How many times have users posted a question about a Gridview, and gotten and excellent response and example back but for a DataGridview. And when your new to the technology, this type of issue is fatal to learning, testing and trying things. There must be a better way these are only two examples. My own experience over the years I have run into many of these types of issues.

Ask a question, it gets attention the first day or 2. From there? usually nothing ever again. Ask a new follow up question and its deleted by zealous moderators as being a duplicate because it has the same words like software or c# in both posts. So the follow up question is gone.

You can post and ask and post and ask in the original question. silence. nothing. I may as well ask my cat for the answer, the information is posted and no replies. So the suggestion is to add some indicator that will signal the question is not answered. This is one of the biggest complaints with asp.net forums.

There are good, smart, nice people but you get no answers. Or risk asking at the cabal of hackers at stack overflow and get flamed and downvoted for not knowing the answer already. ask the stupid question, someone else comes along and reformats the question gets points for that, then down votes you. anyone with less than 50k points is probably stupid anyway. Might get an answer in there from someone with all the mud slinging, can always make a new account once that one is negative.

So if the asp.net forum could get a button to click to say the question is not answered it may help alot.