How fast can we be live?
Answer
About five minutes. Sign in, name your portal, and it is online at yourcompany.myforumcat.com. Nothing to install.
Use case
Answer once.
Then stop retyping it.
Every repeat question is a reply your team has already written. Put that reply on a public page, and the next customer finds it without writing to you. Live in about five minutes.
This sits beside your help desk. There is no ticket queue here, no inbox, and no bot writing answers for you.
Free for 7 days. No credit card. Live in about five minutes.
4places a repeat question gets caught
5 minfrom sign-up to a live portal
$9one time for a working portal
7 days freeto try it, no card needed
The mechanism
There is no trick in it.
Your team answers a question in public, once. One reply gets accepted as the solution and pins under the question.
The portal then makes that answer easy to reach: search, related questions, votes, and a page with its own address. Google and AI engines can read that page too.
The next customer with the same question reads it instead of writing to you. That is community deflection, start to finish. Teams come to us to stop answering the same question, not to buy a bot.
The mechanism, in order
Where repeat questions get caught.
Four moments, each with something in the way. The last row is not a catch. It is where you see what got through.
| When | What catches it | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Before they ask | Full-text search over every question, with solved threads badged | The search box on the portal |
| While they type | Questions that match the title, suggested under the box | The ask page |
| When they land on a thread | The accepted solution pinned under the question, and up to five related questions | Every question page |
| When they browse | Votes, so the questions many customers share sit near the top | The question list |
| After all that | A log of the searches that found nothing, so you can see what is missing | Dashboard analytics |
Search, related questions, duplicate suggestions, votes and the search log are on both plans. Nothing here is an add-on.
Before they ask
Most people search first.
Reading and searching need no account, so there is nothing between a customer and an answer you already wrote. Results stem and rank, so a near miss on the wording still finds the thread.
A solved badge tells someone the thread has a real answer before they open it.
While they type
The form asks: is this the one?
As a customer types a title, the ask form shows existing questions that look like it. A duplicate is caught before it is posted, not merged by a moderator afterwards.
What gets through is what you have not answered yet. Those are the questions worth writing a real answer to.
Fewer duplicates also keeps the archive readable, which is what makes search work a year from now.
After you answer
The search log tells you what to write next.
Analytics keeps a list of searches that returned nothing. It is the shortest content plan you will ever get, and your customers wrote it.
Beside it: page views per question, the most-read threads, and how much activity the portal saw. All of it server-side and cookie-free.
Answer the top miss. Then the next one. This is how to reduce ticket volume without guessing what customers are stuck on.
- Searches with no results, in one list
- Views per question, so you can see what is carrying the load
- Activity counts for questions, replies and members
What we will not tell you.
We do not publish a deflection percentage. Any number we made up would say something about our sales page and nothing about your portal.
There is no answer bot. Answers come from your team. Your own AI agent can draft one over the REST API or MCP, and a person posts it.
There is no widget and no in-app help panel. The portal is a page you link to from your site, your app and your reply templates.
And this is not a help desk. Keep the one you have for the one-to-one work.
FAQ
Fair questions.
What is the return on ticket deflection here?
Answer
The return is time. Watch two things: the view count on each answered question, and the search log. We will not invent a percentage for you.
Will it reduce support volume on its own?
Answer
Not on its own. It works when the links go where the questions already are. Reply templates, the help center, the app, the onboarding email.
How do we know what to answer next?
Answer
The dashboard logs every search that found nothing, and shows the most-viewed questions. Write the answer to the top miss, and it stops being a miss.
Does it replace our help desk?
Answer
No. Keep your help desk for one-to-one work. Forumcat is the public place beside it where the answers many customers share get written once.
Do customers need an account to read?
Answer
No. Reading and searching are open to everyone. Signing in is only for asking, replying, and voting, and it is passwordless.
What does it cost in month twelve?
Answer
The same as month one. $9 one time for a portal on a Forumcat subdomain, or $99 a month for your own domain. The bill never grows with traffic or questions.
Where next
Customer self serviceThe wider case for letting customers help themselves first.Support forumA support forum you switch on, instead of one you host.Q&A softwareVotes, accepted solutions, categories, search and the API behind them.Community help centerHow the public answers sit next to the help center you already have.
Write the answer once. Send the link forever.
Start with the five questions your team answers every week. That is one afternoon, and those five answers are the ones you send most.
Create your portalFree for 7 days. No credit card. Live in about five minutes.
