If I would do it again, I'd use a simple 'help' (or ?) button in most places to link directly to the relevant FAQ entry.
If your website is very technical in nature (and some are), I don't think there is a way around the FAQ, the people that use their FAQ for stupid marketing speak ought to be shot for misleading the public and devaluing a genuinely useful construct.
It seems that with the increase of time the probability of any surface turning into a bill board approaches '1'.
Unfortunately FAQs seem to be subject to this law.
Basically the FAQ is our first line of 'defense' in the support process, we hope that the FAQ will help the user, if that isn't the case a 'real live person' (tm) will take care of the request.
Other things about billing and account issues and so on have found their spot there. It saves us tons of support questions and that really helps to keep us productive. If a question was never answered before it goes in to the FAQ in the appropriate section.
So, really we should probably call it 'QTALSAO' but that's a bit non-standard :)
The answers to FAQ should be on the front page!
If your users stopped looking at them pat yourself at the back and remove them :).
On the other hand, there are changes that could be useful. For instance, "rules about submissions" could be on the Submit page, and "rules for comments" could appear when actually commenting. A lot of the other things could be written or linked from a user's profile page.
Those are great suggestions for the Feature Requests thread:
These won't show up in any significant way in your logs, because after the users have digested the information there, they won't go back to those pages again. But I still think those pages are crucial in making the initial impression / conversion, and also to a lesser extent, SEO.
Just one opinion..
