Question2Answer 1.6 Progress

Question

Hi all. Q2A 1.6 beta is being readied. These changes have been implemented and can be seen in action on this site:

• Allow users to post public messages on other users' pages (if admin allows it)
• Full protection against cross-site request forgery attacks on all forms (CSRF)
• Allows names to be added to anonymous posts
• Add panels in user page for recent user activity and all user questions and answers.
• Highlight user favorite questions, tags, categories and users wherever those entities appear.
• Make it clear why each item is listed in the user updates page (you should see this for all events from Jan 31 in your 'My Updates' page).
• Allow moderation to be reapplied when a post is changed (filter modules can also now apply remoderation)
• Allow privileged users to see who voted posts up and down, and who flagged them, by mousing over.
• Allow custom user profile fields to optionally be shown on the registration form, and to have restricted permissions for viewing them on user profile pages.
• Allow user moderation - either to prevent unapproved users doing anything, or to have different permissions for unapproved and approved users. Emails can be sent to admin notifying of new users. Also fast one-click admin interface for moderating users, which shows their profile fields.
• (Slight) improvement to plugins section of admin panel.
• Edits can be made silently by users with appropriate permissions.
• New BLOBs (avatars, uploaded files) can be stored on disk rather than in the database - see QA_BLOBS_DIRECTORY in qa-config-example.php. It's OK if some old ones are in the database and some new ones on disk. Uploaded files can be migrated between disk and database on the admin/stats page.
• File and image upload API (for plugins) in qa-app-upload.php
• Per-category level settings for users (e.g someone can be a moderator for a specific category only).
• Lots of small tweaks and fixes

Q2A 1.6 beta 1 is complete, and barring any surprises, it will be released tomorrow (June 6th).

Gideon

Comments

I know this is probably way late Gideon, but what would your thoughts be on a 'Listener' module type?
I just posted a long wafted response to Mehede Hasan's post here that could give you an idea of what I'm thinking.
Cheers
 http://www.question2answer.org/qa/19183/anonymous-posting-by-name-and-email

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You can't select best answer it brings up error message Please click again to confirm

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Divide the My favorites page after 30 issues.  And then my selected questions on one page, very long.

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>Can you make the voting plugin to allow people that are not loged in to vote?
Agree. In pligg it s allowd to vote for anonimous visitors

Answer 1

My opinion.

1. Selection of category

I would like to make multiple selection like WordPress. 

2. Morphological Analysis

I would like to replace morphological analysis processing with plugin. I would like to search correctly also to Japanese or Chinese. I want the language which is not separated by a space for a word to correspond. Before, I changed core of Q2A, and incorporated lower morphological analysis engine.

http://mecab.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/mecab/doc/index.html

 

3. Attachment management

 

・Automatic resizing of image

・Manage attached file not by DB but by file
・Restriction by max pixel size

・The maximum capacity restrictions for every user

 

4. Notifications

 

I wish for the method of adding email-queuing-table to DB, and transmitting asynchronously by cron rather than send immediately after contribution.

 

5. User's Dashboard

 

I would like to move to page with many drawers which can choose features after login easily. Like of management screen of CMS systems including WordPress ...

 

I appreciate very much efforts of developers.

Answer 2

 

Maybe I am too late and maybe most things already been posted but still I am adding some points if something missed what I am thinking.

Better User Profile Page:

Where any user can find almost all statics of the user. How many question been asked or answered, comment, points, vote etc. like stack overflow.

Direct link in notification email:

Now email notification contains only question link. That would be great if it provide direct link of the answer or comment so if there are many answers or comments than no need to find new one rather link will directly take there.

I just wonder and don't know what I was looking in my email but seems I found that email links are pretty okay :P extreemly sorry for this.

AJAX Refresh:

As some of the boards are very busy and that is always good if content loads without refresh after certain time of interval via AJAX.

Live notification:

I think this point has already been mentioned that live notification on the login bar.

Required Plug-in Sub Pages:

It is becoming too much to manage on the same page if  board has more than 5-10 plug-in installed. So can be great if plug-in page will have own vertical navigation for each plug-in and loads plug-in setting in the right side of content area. This can make admin’s life easiear than now to jump and scroll up and down. So layout for the plug-in page will become three columns. In fact removing widget (sidebar) area from admin section is also alternative as it is not so useful. Anytime if admin want to see the updates on the sidebar he can go to the front end and check or can open another window than just refresh the update.

Include Plugin from the contributors:

I think now you should include few very useful plug-in by the great contributors. Some of them like Badges from NoahY, Widget Anywhere from Scott, Accept Rage by NoahY also User per Month by Kai etc.

HTML structure flexibility:

This may be huge work to make it happen and don’t know is it possible or not in reality but my idea behind this is to create some more flexible system like WordPress where user can define them own HTML structure while design the theme.

Comments

The Wordpress-like theming might be quite difficult, as with Q2A you need to make sure you've called all the appropriate functions for displaying content, forms etc. WP themes are pretty much just a shell around a block of content, Q2A is more advanced.

But at the same time I think it would be easier for site owners to simply write a HTML page and add appropriate function calls for each element.

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@Scott,
Yes I can understand that it is difficult theming like WordPress. In fact that was an example but can be little flexible than current if not exactly same as WordPress.
However the idea you said about HTML page and add function which is almost fulfill the point I mentioned. :)

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funny - you actually had me searching for 'Accept Rage' by NoahY... thought it must be some sort of flame-war plugin.

Answer 3

 

I'd like to see more modularity. I have a custom CMS with a structure:

 

startup();

header();

call_page_code()

sidebar();

footer();

 

I'm going to have to hack q2a to integrate it, which means that every update is going to be a project rather than a drop-in. It would be nice if there was an "include" that would make q2a render in a div within a theme. A themeless version.

 

minor hacks work ok, but I'll have to move the cookie stuff out of q2a. Wordpress has set a bad precedent by making the theme a piece of the cms. It should be the other way around; the content should render cleanly within a theme wrapper; making it easier to manage both independently.

 

Some docs would be nice too.

Answer 4

A spell check warning box would be nice. Something like the one below. It also links directly to a microsoft word like spell checker with dictionary and suggestions.

 

 

Answer 5

Here is mine:

 

View count on question view, not only in question list.

It would solve problem when you need to search you question in question list to find out how many views exact question got.

Each tag have own CSS class.

So you can set for example little icon for popular tag.

"We've missed you" messages to verified users who didn't login for X days.

With that kind of feature (or plugin) you can atract more old users who just forgot site.

Seperate <div> for question authors comments.

For example i could do in my site that my username would be in green color in OP's  comments so enyone would see that comments are made by question author.

Similar feature is in some wordpress themes (authors comments are in particular background color).

Questions sorting by time:

 

Questions > Most votes > ...of week, of three  months, of year, all time;

 

Questions > Most answers > ...of week, of three  months, of year, all time;

 

Questions > Most views > ...of week, of three  months, of year, all time.

Answer 6

It would be useful if the extra field was displayed:

1) For answers and comments as well as questions

2) In Moderation

Answer 7

Integration of LDAP login method; Kheiligh already did a great job

http://www.question2answer.org/qa/12490/ldap-support-in-questions-2-answer

Answer 8

Hello!!

I think that it will be great do questions for experts users, but it questions must be visible for all users (experts or not experts users) and send any message email to expert users when questions is there.

And will be great any option for enable normal users and expert users, subscribe to RSS category and subscribe at questions category alerts.

THANKS BOYS!! GOOD LUCKY!! AND GOOD JOB!

Answer 9

1. There should be a theme editor in admin area
2. Badges plugin should be inbuilt with improvisation
3. recent tags and recent posts should be inbuilt.
4. System in q2a website for avoiding plugin conflicts
5. More SEO options like, nofollow, noindex options for pages, tags, categories etc

Comments

I worry that granting "Points for Editing Question/answer/comments" would invite undesirable behavior.

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yes, so I would like to remove that point now!

Answer 10

 Can we get a bit organised 'use profile' page by default, something like the given screenshot.

Comments

i really like it

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What site is that from? Looks quite nice.

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google search: "learn about reputation, badges, and points"
revealed
www.spanishdict.com/answers/232251/how-do-you-get-lots-of-badges
and its CDN
a1.sdcdns.com/users/achievements

Answer 11

My wish list:

1. Admin authorization of new user registrations
2. Better site stats, like more about anonymous user activity
3. A user 'wall' or profile page that they can customize
4. Active Directory (AD) user authentication
5. Easier way to customize the user registration form to require more fields, add custom validation, etc
6. Bounties
7. Anonymous user email subscription
8. User notification "inbox" of sorts
9. A bulletin/announcement widget
10. Top users in a given Category and/or Tag

It was hard to come up with 10... you have an awesome product as it is!

Answer 12

hi gridgreen,

the nice-to-have feature might be as follows:

1> realtime suggestion of the search box;

2> performance optimization; e.g. realtime suggestion of the search box through redis;

thanks.