Community Credit Forums

It should be possible to drive traffic to the forums and encourage users to use them if you have guest developers for topics.

This would have a specific person with a specific skills moderating and answering forum posts on a specific topic. That developer would get extra points for being a Guest Developer and all his/her posts marked as "Expert answers".

This will provide developers with a sense of Ownership of the forums without having to have everyone as a moderator all of the time. the "Guest Developer" feature should be limited to a specific forum for a specific time.

I like that idea....though just to clarify I think only those posts which are in "their" forum should count as "Expert Answers" versus marking all their discussion posts as "Expert".

That is an idea that I have bounced around a bit in my head in the past, so I am happy that you have suggested it as well.  Great minds thnk alike. I think that it is one that can really drive traffic and recognition to the forums.  One issue that I would like to solve before doing that is to get more people active in the forums and asking questions.   Due to the nature of community credit, we have many more experts than beginners, thus many more people who can answer questions than are asking.  If I were to have "Guest  developers" moderating, they might get bored and the idea may lose momentum.  I do have some ideas, such as the "Forum Fiesta" that aim to bring more people to the forum asking questions.  A nice side effect to that is that it will also help bring the user groups together and the community together as well. 

I would love to hear your thoughts on implementations.  Do you think that the "Guest Developer" should be recognized for a week, for a month, for two weeks?  I think that if the period of time was too long, it might discourage new "guests" for fear that they would not have time to dedicate to it.  Maybe not.  If we had more than one "Guest" at a time, would it take away from the prestige and make them feel less special?  This is an idea that I would love to implement.

The guest developer is a great idea. Let's face it - the kind of people you want to attract are like magpies (basically people with minds like mine), so award them something bright and shiny and they'll stick around and help for a bit.

If we could get community-credit mentioned at every user group meeting and code camp this year I think we'd have enough folks that there'd be a balance of folks asking questions and answering them :)

 I'm already doing my part - and for those who are interested I have a small slide deck I'll give you that gives a brief overview of Community-Credit. I use it at Code Camps, user group meetings and other events I go to where they give me a chance to talk in front of people...speaking of other events the last few times they had an MSDN event in town I was able to talk to people about Community-Credit on stage either before or after the Microsoft DE was talking.

Spread the word! :)

I like it.  I like it alot!  Anybody in particular that you would like to see as a guest developer?