Hey! I’m in marketing and I understand the concept of backlinks but I don’t really understand backlinks.
I’m a DevRel working at an AI startup leading communities and also building a product. I’m working on getting some SEO traction. I have a blogs page and I know backlinks would help except I don’t quite understand them.
Anyway, please explain it to me like I don’t know anything about marketing.
TIA!
I work in DevRel and spend a lot of my time answering the same questions in Discord, GitHub, and Slack. Some of the answers are in the docs, and some aren't. I've used Kapa.ai, and it solves this, but it's hosted only and out of reach for small teams. So I built an open source version for teams that can't justify paying for it, whether you're a small startup, open source project, gaming community, or anything in between.
What it does:
During onboarding, you upload your knowledge source (docs, PDFs, a GitHub repo, or Notion pages). Then connect answerLoops to your communities, and when someone asks a question, an agent drafts an answer from that content.
A second agent then reviews the draft and gives it a confidence score. If it scores low, it goes to your team for human review instead of being posted. Auto-reply is off by default until you turn it on, and you set the threshold per platform.
Where it differs from Kapa:
- AGPL-3.0, self-host with Docker and Postgres
- Use your own model key or a local model
- Website chat widget built with CopilotKit and Mastra. Paste a snippet into your site or docs, and visitors can ask questions without an account
- More channels: Discord, GitHub, Slack, Telegram.
- In testing: Discourse, Circle, email, Google Chat
- MCP server and REST API, so your own agents can search the same knowledge
Easy setup:
npx u/answerloops/agent-sdk setup
Or if you use coding assistant, it can walk you through it:
npx u/answerloops/agent-sdk skills answerloops-setup
Repo: https://github.com/answerLoops/answerLoops
I'd welcome your feedback, especially from anyone who's used Kapa or something similar, to help us continually improve the product. Any contributions are welcome, and you are new to open source, just reach out, I'd be glad to help.
I work in DevRel. The main platforms I interact with are Discord, GitHub, and Slack, answering questions from the community, and a lot of them are repeat questions. Some of the time the answer is in the docs, and some of the time it isn't.
So I built answerLoops to do that part for me. You upload your knowledge (docs, PDFs, a GitHub repo or Notion pages), and an agent answers questions in Discord, Slack, Discourse, Telegram, GitHub issues, email, or a chat widget on your site.
The agent drafts a reply with the sources it used, then a second agent double checks it's work against those sources. Nothing gets sent automatically unless you turn that on for a channel. Until then, every reply waits for a person to approve it.
Fully open source, run it yourself with Docker and Postgres. There's no subscription for self-hosting, just use your own API key or a local model if you don't want questions leaving your server.
There are skills to setup with one command:
npx u/answerloops/agent-sdk setup
If you use Claude Code, you can also have it walk you through the install. This adds a setup skill so you don't have to read the self-hosting docs first:
npx u/answerloops/agent-sdk skills answerloops-setup
GitHub: https://github.com/answerLoops/answerLoops
I'd really like to hear from anyone running a community (volunteer or nonprofit). If you try it and something is broken or missing, just open an issue, and I'll look at it.
Is this a real problem or am I looking at it the wrong way?
I built a tool to help with this but that’s not the point of this post: if the product and docs were perfect, nobody would need support. That's never the case, so every question in your community- mine is Discord and GitHub- points to something missing or unclear. The problem is what happens next. Maybe someone answers, and the thread gets lost in the abyss. Not much longer, someone else hits the same wall.
Asking this group to find out how you solve this.