Forums are often used for Q&A, but they were not designed for this purpose and would best be described as a workaround. YouSaidIt is like a forum in the sense that it provides visitors with a voice on your site. But it differs from a forum in many ways:

1. Forums typically look and feel very different from your site and there is limited ability to make them feel integrated. YouSaidIt allows you virtually total control of the look and feel so people do not feel like they have left your site.

2. There is rarely a connection between what people say in the forum and the contents of your site. YouSaidIt provides the structure to easily link to specific questions and their associated answers.

3. Forums are difficult to discover (in search engines), difficult to surface (in widgets or other data feeds), and difficult to navigate. YouSaidIt provides structured Q&A which is given preference by search engines. Links from search engines will also go directly to the correct questions/answer rather than to a lengthy discussion in which the answer is buried. YouSaidIt had widgets, an API, RSS and email subscriptions.

4. In forums, questions, answers and discussion are intermingled and there is no ability to rank Q&A by quality. YouSaidIt allows people to vote on the best answers.

5. In forums, questions cannot be targeted, experts cannot be featured, sorting is almost always chronological rather than by quality. YouSaidIt questions to be directed to specific experts and provides publishing flexibility to easily feature the content that you want to highlight.

6. Forums typically do not provide identity integration. With YouSaidIt your visitors can sign in using their Facebook account or they can sign in using your site account.

Yes and No. Yes in that it provides a forum for your community to ask and answer questions. No in all other ways. Unlike forums this is not a long winded discussion that wanders on and off topic, with relevant questions buried somewhere inside. This is about asking questions, getting answers, ranking the best and featuring them with specific products. Unlike forums you can also feature specific experts, such as sales reps or product managers, and have questions directed specifically to them.