The Community Exchange is a place on the dnnsoftware.com website where users can exchange questions and answers. It is powered by the Q&A (abbreviation for questions and answers) module which functions similar to Yahoo Questions (in addition to other question oriented websites). If you are familiar with StackOverflow, the user experience is somewhat similar.

The Community Exchange is also dnnsoftware.com's first foray into some exciting new "reputation based" based features (referred to by some as gamification), whereby the more you participate the more privileges you receive! And the more questions you ask, the more you make it possible for others to gain reputation by helping you!

Privileges

As mentioned above, the module uses an individual's reputation to determine what privileges they have been granted in the Community Exchange. The more reputation points an individual has, the more privileges they are granted. For example, users with 15 reputation points or more can 'create a post', have had the 'remove new user status' granted, can 'flag posts' and the user can also 'vote up' questions and answers (which aren't their own). As time goes on, more privileges will be added. You can view a full list of privileges here or by clicking the 'Privileges' link in the "My Dashboard" navigation seen within the module when logged in.

Taxonomy/Folksonomy

Each question asked by end users must be associated with 1-5 tags. These tags are required to help make it easier for other users to understand, quickly, what the question is about. It also aids other users looking for answers to find the same question later on by performing a search based on a tag. Likewise, this association also makes it easier for users who may be an expert on a specific tag to subscribe to new questions (associated w/ a specific tag) and then provide answers.

Crowd-Sourced Folksonomy

Since users are required to associate their question with at least one tag, there is also a privilege "remove new users status' that permits them to edit the description of a tag. Each revision of a description change is saved within the module, but when an update is made the core taxonomy description is updated thus the tag description update is immediately applied across your entire installation.

User Scoring

In order for users to build reputation, certain actions end users can perform within the module are assigned reputation point values referred to as scoring actions. These values are positive (+) for encouraged behavior, while others are negative (-). For example, each time a user asks a question they receive 1 reputation point for simply asking the question. If the user's question is up-voted by another user, the question author will receive an additional 5 points (thus giving them 6 reputation points for asking that question so far). However, if that same question is flagged 6x the user will receive a -2 to their reputation (thus a net of +4 for asking that question).