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

---

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

---

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

---

>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

A couple of things I think could be better:

1) There should be an exclusion for editing by Administrator or Moderator. Sometimes I edit answers to fix spelling or take out objectionable language and I don't want "edited by admin" to be displayed. I've hacked this in my version.

2) I think that the timestamp for the question should be when the person posted the question when a question is moderated, not when the post was approved.

3) Some sort of count bubble on moderation to show if there are messages to be moderated in the admin menu. (like the red bubble in yahoo mail).

Comments

I understand the issue with 2). But if I ask a question at 2pm and it's moderated at 4pm, when I go back and see "asked at 4pm" simply isn't correct. Having a whole bunch of questions asked at the same time (say in the morning when you moderate a bunch of questions) is arguably wrong.

I want to see when people are actually answering questions on the site; not when I get around to moderating them.

---

I think you may have a point here. Some users mentioned it on my site too, specifically for answers.
For questions I can see the reasoning - an approved question may end up on page 2 and forgotten. But on the other hand it will still be found in the Unanswered section.

---

Maybe a field such as originally_asked so that it can be displayed when asked and sorted by the moderation time. Something to further complicate the code. Or yet-another option checkbox.

---

Well said. Thanks to your explanation,  I now have a better sense of why correctly reporting time-of-day for each item is important.

Answer 2

My Suggestion is to have Paypal integration. This is quite important.

Answer 3

Here are some core features I would like to see:

1. The ability to sort answers (i.e. active, oldest, votes)

2. Link questions together (i.e. a "Linked Questions") sidebar widget whenever a different question is linked in the question, comments, or answers.

3. Better Search functionality (check out the "Advanced Search Tips" on http://stackoverflow.com/search)

4. Better tag functionality (i.e. pages, descriptions, followers, rss feeds, etc.).

Note: I'm not quite sure about this one. Can this be done with a plugin or is it better suited for core?

5. More detailed user page (i.e. tags, questions, answers, reputation)

Note: Again I'm not sure if this is best suited as a plugin or in core.

Answer 4

1) USERPAGE / WALL

2) FIELDS

 

At first, thank You for all that what you already have done ! Q2A is a great script and its big fun to work with it.

 

Q2A does offer a question and answer platform, an article or image discuss platform, it can be used as a blog, a collectors page and even a shop or classifieds are thinkable with just manipulating the lists a bit and adding a purchase button. Having all these possible uses in mind it becomes visible that the community part of q2a could be kind of more flexible. A good modern example could be tumblr.com

 

Crucial is here some kind of wall like mentioned in several posts. I understand that a new version can not bring everything but it may be important to have some things in mind when extending the user comunication part and the updates area.

 

You asked for details :)

 

1)  USERPAGE

 

A first idea for a user page for q2a would look like this:

 

PROFILE | WALL | POSTS | FAVORITES | FRIENDS

 

where updates are collected on the wall page.

 

a) PROFILE

 

For the foreign user the profile page could be pretty much the same like it is now.

 

The owner of the profile page and any other page should have an additional tab OPTIONS where he can set what to show and/or make public on his userpages.

 

PROFILE | OPTIONS

 

PROFILE does show the actual description with the picture and avatar (MYACCOUNT).

OPTIONS does allow to set what to show on PROFILE and which user pages in general.

 

Showing something always shoud include a choice ME ONLY|EVERYBODY | FRIENDS | FOLLOWERS

 

b) WALL

 

Logged In Users jump directy to their wall.

 

The Wall could be similar to Noahy history plugin, but core and a little bit more enhanced:

 

It should show to the owner:

 

Users Posts/Questions

Users Answers/Comments

Users Favorites

Users Votes/Likes

Users made friends

Users Friends Questions/Answers

Users Friends Favs

Users is followed by

Users does follow

Users badges

Users public messages

 

The owner and friends should have the option to post directly on the wall page a question (post) 

or a public message to friends and followers.

 

All this in chronological order with date and time. 

Posts and answers in qlist optics showing the title, a small image if available and 

first three lines of the post with the option to show full posts.

 

In WALL / Options the user can set what to show to whom by checking optionfields:

Show to me only / Show to everybody / Show to friends / Show to followers

 

Best practice would be if each item on the wall would come with a button where one can choose to whom to show. 

That could be legally important as well.

 

The wall should load always lets say the last 10 days or 30 items. 

If more is wanted a more button at the bottom of page loads the next 10 days or 30 items.

 

The wall must have a ask/public message/send private message box on top.

 

The wall must have a top menu with: new private messages and new followers or friendrequests on top.

 

 

c) POSTS

 

(Posts can be questions or news or portfolio for example)

 

Posts could be similar to Scotts activity plus plugin but core.

 

ALL | QUESTIONS | ANSWERS | OPTIONS  (or on a blog like page: ALL | POSTS | COMMENTS)

 

In Posts / Options the user can decide what to show by checking optionfields.

Show to me / Show to everybody / Show to friends / Show to followers

 

Posts would show complete lists of posts / answers just like the original plugin.

Everything in questionlist optics with the option to show fulltext or images as well.

 

 

d) FAVORITES

 

Favorites could be the same like it is now, just enhanced with the 

Favorites / Options  menu what to show to whom and the option to show fulltext or images as well.

 

 

e) FRIENDS

 

Submenu  FRIENDS | FOLLOWERS | FOLLOWING | OPTIONS

 

Friends is crucial.

 

A friend could be a confirmed follower or lets say a mutual follower as we follow him as well.

Followers can be blocked as well.

 

This gives us the option that we have three different groups.

Public, followers and friends. We can offer our followers/fans certain access to our wall and still have 

the friends group with even deeper access. 

 

On the Followers and Friends submenu each user mast have a button where to up-/downgrade him into follower

or friend or even block him. He must be informed on his wall top menu about this change, a reason can be provided.

 

It would be important to choose an architecture which would allow later to add easily groupfeatures.

 

----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- 

 

2) Fields

 

It would be great to have on the ask or post page more flexibility through fields.

 

The admin should have the option to offer various textfields, various imagefields, viedeofields, snippetfields and so on.

 

You can see something similar on modx or expressionengine, as well phplinkdirectory for example uses this technique.

 

Instantly one could have a classiefieds page, a wiki page, a news page, a collectors page or whatever one wants.

 

May be a classic question and answer page does not need that, but I think q2a is ready to do so many more things !!!!

 

 

Answer 5

 

Sorry for bad English

the ability to log on to an invite.

Thank you.

Answer 6

1) Allow adding contents and images to category pages which currently only contains list of questions.

2) Customized title name only for homepage.

Answer 7

I'd love to be able to put a bounty on questions. To place a bounty, you donate some of your points as a reward for a really good answer to your question.

It might add incentive for people to answer hard questions or get more input for questions that have received little interest.

 

Answer 8

Shall we make the search box and ask box together ?

Answer 9

Hello,

My idea :

An exponential rating system :

(sorry for this picture)

The idea : give a bonus for a great answer, and a malus for a rude answer for exemple).

Thank you very much for your work.

 

Answer 10

Many of the requests in this thread, and requests in general, sound like fitting a square peg into a round hole.

FWIW, most of these suggested/requested features are already present (natively, or as addons) in the "vanilla forums" web app (getvanilla.org). The requestors might consider whether that app is better suited to their site's needs than the Q2A app.

Answer 11

Note: I'm still using 1.4.1, so apologies if any of these have already been implemented.

 

 

HTML Templates - I spent about 2 weeks, full time, customizing Q2A to fit my site's particular needs and the biggest portion of that time has been dealing with themes.  Currently, layout is determined within the structure of theme functions, which makes it hard to do simple things like "display the upvote button on the left of the question and the down vote button on the right".  Silly example, but you get the point.  Both buttons are included in a single larger function (qa_html_theme_base::voting) that assumes they will always appear together.  Changing this default behavior is not easy.  It would be so much faster to have HTML templates so that I could edit the structure of the markup without worrying about.  For the purpose of bringing Q2A forward to the point where it can achieve really wide adoption, I think this is the most important thing you can do.

 

Avoid Global variables, use Classes / inheritance to make Q2A more extensible - Global variables make it tough to integrate Q2A into existing sites.  It's also tough to tweak the behavior of particular functions that aren't in the themes.  There is no way to easily overwrite them so you have to make inline changes that make upgrading difficult.  If everything were in a class that would automatically look for it's extension (as qa_html_theme_base already does) it would be so much easier to hack changes into the system.

 

More email tools - As an admin, I would like to be able to email everyone who is involved with a question.

 

 

Act as Admin - I would like to be able to take actions as the site itself.  This would help provide consistent branding and would fit nicely with featured questions.  Formspring.me also does a nice job of using this technique to provide an "official" feel to certain activity.

Location tags - I think location tagging could also be extremely valuable for many Q2A sites.  Ideally, we could auto-tag questions with the user's location (which would be part of the external users integration) but also allow people to change / modify the location tag for a given question.  Facebook does this for status updates and it is generating a tremendously valuable dataset for them.

Comments

AFAIK, without exception, all the q2a globals varnames bear a "qa_" prefix. Across dozens of PHP apps I've reviewed, I can't recall ever seeing conflictingly-named "qa_" globals.

"display the upvote button on the left of the question and the down vote button on the right". I think it's a very good example, not silly. Yes, if it wasn't such a PITA to revise, I might choose to separate their placement (place downvote way off to the side, tiny link anchor, so that it is less easily/accidentally clicked).

Answer 12

I would say:

1. More SEO friendly like a different description for each added page.

2. Invite users to answer questions (if user previously has answered a question related to what your asking based on keywords)

3. Option to moderate posts with links (this will stop potential spammers)

4. An option to allow users to start Quizess similar to the Poll plugin

5. Option to remove extra privilges display on users pages.

6. Keywords/tags highlight within question text and link to tag page like Wikipedia does

6 Example: What can we expect in version-1.6 will automatically turn version-1.6 into a link to the tag page.

Thanks

Comments

"Invite users to answer questions (if user previously has answered a question related to what your asking based on keywords)"

^---- that's a REALLY clever idea !