Patent ID: 8918391

Claim:
A peer forum system for routing questions and answers among peers having common interests, the peer forum system being implemented on a digital computer network and comprising: a user interface operatively associated with a digital computer for enabling user information to be input via the digital computer network; and a question router associated with the digital computer network, said question router being adapted to automatically route questions to relevant peers, thereby increasing question and answer rates provided by the peer forum system, said question router comprising: a forums database for capturing questions and answers provided via the peer forum system; a stage database associated with the forums database for pulling questions from the forums database and storing the questions; a peer search module associated with the stage database for pulling the questions from the stage database and finding peers who can answer the questions; a recommendation engine operatively associated with the peer search module for recommending peers who can answer the question; a peer profile database associated with the recommendation engine that stores explicit and implicit profiles for each of the peers; a set of throttle rules associated with the peer search module for determining if peers found by the peer search module are eligible to be sent a communication requesting the peers to answer the question; and a communication delivery system for delivering the communication to eligible peers; wherein: the implicit profiles for the peers comprise user-related information relating to independent behavior of the peers on the digital computer network; and the user-related information relating to independent behavior of the peers on the digital computer network comprises at least one of search terms used, documents read, and alerts set up on the digital computer network.