frequently asked questions (Internet) (FAQ)

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) are frequently asked questions about topics on a website. FAQs cover all topics. They can be questions about a printer, its connection and the installation of printer cartridges, questions about a software installation or any other topic. Answers to appropriate questions can be listed or provided by chatbots and virtual agents.

Depending on the website and website service, the FAQs are answered by the community, by a chatbot, or by the website operator, or listed with the corresponding answers as web services. Publishing FAQs has the advantage that frequently asked and equally frequently answered questions do not tie up additional staff capacity. In the case of chatbots, the fact is that they work with Natural Language Understanding( NLU) and understand the meaning of the questions. This allows them to respond to the questions in a dedicated way and answer them intuitively. One can also assign target group-oriented character traits to the chatbots.

Many topic-specific FAQs are managed by newsgroups and other mailing lists and can be used by members of these groups. This allows recurring questions to be answered in a time-saving manner. Thenewsgroup news.answers contains the FAQ lists of all newsgroups. The first FAQs appeared in the newsgroups in 1991. Today there are thousands of FAQs posted regularly in the newsgroups. They are archived on many web servers, gopher servers and FTP servers around the world.