I prefer to publish a third-party technical documentation in the forum to achieve the following goals:
- Decrease manual support costs.
Some merchants really able to read, and they could resolve their questions/issues much faster themselves, without waiting for a reply from a support team member.
- Achieve new customers.
Some potential customers were able to answer their common questions quickly themselves, without switching to concurrent solutions.
Usually, a potential customer investigates multiple concurrent solutions at once, and if he is not able to find a ready public answer to his question (e.g. about a merchant interface feature he needs), he would more probably switch to a concurrent solution (in the best case he would ask a question about the feature he needs, and then he would spend the response waiting time on investigating this feature in concurrent solutions). - Referring.
- Any public document can be referred from other sources (up to Google, Wikipedia, and StackExchange), giving high-quality relevant traffic.
- Any public document can be exactly referred from internal sources (other forum documents, program source code, issues), increasing their quality by providing an exact direct link to a particular information (instead of a generic «read the manual» reply).