Can you make a forum or discussion board in Confluence Cloud?

The short answer

Confluence Cloud has no forum or discussion board feature: no threads, no topics, no “mark as solved”. What it has is pages, blog posts and two kinds of comments (Atlassian: Comment on pages, live docs, whiteboards, blog posts, and slides). Out of those you can build something forum-like by hand. For a real forum or Q&A, there are apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, including Atlassian’s own Questions for Confluence (Atlassian: Ask a question).

Option 1: a discussion page with comments

Create a page per topic, for example “Questions about the deployment process”, and let people discuss in the comments under it. Replies to a comment are shown indented under it, so a page comment and its replies work as one thread. Inline comments, attached to a selected sentence, work for remarks about a specific part of the page.

• Set it up. Make a parent page called “Discussions” or “Questions” and a child page per topic. Pin the rules at the top of the parent page: one topic per page, answer in the comments, add the answer to the page when it is settled. People who watch the space are notified of new pages and comments.
• What you get. Nothing to install, no permissions to think about beyond the space, and the discussion sits next to the documentation it is about.
• Where it stops working. With a handful of topics it is fine. With fifty, nobody can see which questions are still open, there is no way to mark one reply as the answer, and search finds comments less well than page text.

Option 2: blog posts as a feed

Every space has a blog. A blog post is a page with a date, shown newest first in the space’s blog view, and people comment under it like under a page. That makes blog posts a reasonable “announcements and discussion” feed for a team or a department: one post per topic, discussion in the comments.

• What you get. A chronological list, which is what many people mean by a forum. Readers watching the space are notified of new posts.
• Where it stops working. Blog posts have no hierarchy and no “solved” state, and old posts drop out of sight. Good for news, poor for a knowledge base that people search a year later.

Option 3: a questions page with a table

If you mainly want questions answered, not discussion, a single page with a table does more than you would think: columns for question, asked by, answer, status. Anyone edits the page to add a row; the person who knows fills in the answer. Confluence search finds the text, and the page history shows who changed what. It breaks down when the table passes a few dozen rows and when nobody feels responsible for the “open” rows. How to build an FAQ in Confluence Cloud has a template for this.

Option 4: a forum or Q&A app

The Marketplace has two families of apps for this. Forum apps add threaded discussion boards to a page or space: topics, replies, sometimes likes and moderation. Q&A apps are narrower: a question, answers, votes and one accepted answer, so the next person sees what worked. Points worth comparing before you install either: whether you can turn it on per space or only for the whole site, who may post and who moderates, whether one answer can be marked as the solution, how you get your data out again, and where the data is stored.

Full disclosure: Dortus makes AskSpace Q&A, a Q&A app, not a forum. A space admin turns it on in the spaces that need it; nothing changes elsewhere. People ask a question with a title, details and tags; similar questions show up while they type. Others answer and vote, and the person who asked marks the best answer (never their own). Who may ask and who may answer are set separately: everyone in the space, space admins, or chosen Confluence groups, with moderator groups that can edit or delete. A questions block shows the latest questions of a space on a page. A space admin can import from Questions for Confluence or a CSV file, and export everything to CSV. It runs on Atlassian Forge, and questions, answers and votes are stored in Atlassian’s Forge app storage, not on Dortus servers.

What AskSpace does not do: open-ended threaded discussion. If your team wants to debate, a forum app or Option 1 fits better. If your team wants answers that are findable later, Q&A is the shape that works.

Which option fits

A few topics, one team: a discussion page per topic with comments. News and reactions: blog posts. Questions with a definite answer, a dozen a month: a table on a page. Questions from many people, where the right answer must be easy to find later: a Q&A app, Atlassian’s or one from the Marketplace. Real debate with many threads: a forum app.

FAQ

Questions

Spotted something wrong on this page, or a way we missed? Email support@dortus.com.

See also: Q&A in Confluence Cloud: your options, Stop answering the same questions in Slack and Open questions buried in Confluence comments