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

I'd like to sum several proposals:

1) There should be a bounty award a.k.a. featured questions

2) There should be a personal inbox to aggregate all user related events, especially those events, which engages user to participate in community

3) There should be an option to sort answers by votes, dates or latest activity. To cope with content duplication, rel canonical should be "order by votes" version.

4) Make a visual distinction between ordinary user and real expert is a very good idea. Consider a use-case of some medical consulting site - admins may want to make real doctors look different to present better user experience.

 

And last but not least thing (IMHO): StackOverflow succeded because they are completely insane about perfect user experience. That means, they are centric at (a) great content, (b) motivated community and (c) site design (not how neat it look, but how good is to use it). You can't do many with a content, you kinda "responsible" for a site engine. And you can do a lot to help build (b) motivated community and (c) site design. Badges, clearly visible user ratings, leader tables, inboxes with "You've just received new badge!" and all carefully selected and crafted StackOveflow's gamification stuff - all of that things should be available out-of-the-box in any SO-clone, that wants to be successfull. Not because SO or Quora also did this, but because it works very well in engaging community to participate.

I've just examined Q2A sites... You know, I'd got bad feeling about I won't be happy using Q2A engine. Most of these sites are overspammed and virtually dead. Could this only be because their owners chose wrong niche and failed to fill their site with a good content and failed to attract vibrant community? Well, eventually yes. But could this be just because they chose wrong site engine, that doesn't engage community enough?...Who knows?

 

Anyway, thanks for you did to this moment! Wish you luck.

 

UPD:

5) Yes, JavaScript should be unobtrusive. It is also necessary for good SEO.

 

UPD2:

6) User uploaded images should be (or better to say must be) stored at file system. Storing it in a DB is amazingly slow.

7) Overall performance of the engine is slow and should be improved. I was wrong. Posted an answer about it below.

 

UPD3:

8) It would be nice if the engine will generate absolute URLs (starting with http:// ,or at worst case starting with / if the site is located in root) instead of relative to current position (starting with ../)

9) There should be no invalid URLs at all, it hurts SEO significantly. For example, relative URLs with double slashes are very bad. Mod_rewrite is definately not an option...

10) Please, don't hardcode http protocol version in sources, it can lead to very strange and hard to diagnose problems. Please, use $_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'] everewhere instead of hardcoded 'HTTP/1.0' or 'HTTP/1.1' strings.

 

UPD4

11) ANTISPAM: Moderators should be notified not only about every new question / answer / comment, but when the old one have been edited. May be not everytime, only when new edition contains links to non-whitelisted resources.

Comments

@Arech: good point :)

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I've never seen a "bounty" mechanism in use across the various StackExchange sites.

If your notion of "bounty" involves CASH/bitcoin and PAID "featured" questions, I wish you'd just go use a knockoff freelancer.com php script  instead of hoping to bend Q2A into an ill-suited alternative freelancer script.

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> I've never seen a "bounty" mechanism in use across the various StackExchange sites.

http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=featured - 365 questions at this moment. Looks like it's fairly popular, isn't it?

> If your notion of "bounty" involves CASH/bitcoin and PAID "featured" questions...

No, no, no... My notion of this term is equals to what stackoverflow means and uses. I've just given the link to a list of bounty questions.

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Oh, okay, reputation points rewarded as bounty. Thanks for the clarification.

Answer 2

Hello All, first i wanna thank Gideon for this powerful script, and other contributors.

My suggestions for 1.6 are as follows:

1. Intergrate Featured Questions into the core, with option to make it free or paid.

2. Ability for each category to have its own moderator or moderators, and receive emails when new content in their cat comes in.

3. Ability to have EXpert for each category, eg Assign a Doctor as expert in Health category, answers by experts will be privilegde, not necessary the best answer, but will be up on the list, and highlighted as Experts answer.

4. Improved user management, ability to show top users- weekly, monthly etc as widget,

5. Integrated blog system.

6. Improve social network intergration. Share/tweet button on questions, answers, comments. Auto fetch questions from twitter from a predefined #tag, say #whoigoask,

7. Q2A's Q2A should have a donate button, for us to support the development

Thank you, my Q2A site is http://www.whoigoask.com

Comments

What's the point of "5. Integrated blog system"?
There is a WordPress integration available, why one should spend a lot of time to make Yet Another blog system ?

Answer 3

 

Thanks for developing Q2A. I wish, that the next version has:

• Automatic Upgrade.
• Spell Checker (Spanish).
• SEO Title.
• Theme editor.
• Remove users whitout activity.
• Integration with phpBBB3.
• Statistics.

Answer 4

Gideon, Thank you for working so hard on QA. If possible please consider below features...

1. More interactive user page, I liked current design but I feel if member activity next to user profile may look better. User wall can be below profile and then recent activity. May be we can disable sidebar on user page. Follow and following option on user page(like twitter). Intention is, user should feel proud to promote qa/user/name link to his friends like facebook.com/username

2. One click upgrade option to new version of QA.

3. WYSIWYG editor to edit pages.

4. SEO focus for custom pages.

5. Better search.(now only QA are searched, add pages to search)

6. Admin option to replace top search box with google search.

7. Theme editor option like wordpress.

8. Automatic ban user if receives N number of flags for question, answer or comment.

9. Send registered user for admin approval (optional feature)

10. Show users who registered in last 24 hrs.(it will help for handling spam users)

11. Delete user option.

12. Signin using Google, twitter and openid

Answer 5

The most important changes is too make Q2A more social. 

• Notification system like facebook. 
• better mail system under Users 
• function reference for developper like http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference
• option that disable user to select his answer as best
• use php lucene to search of related question. 

 

Answer 6

Just wanted to say, that looks like I was wrong about my point '7) Overall performance of the engine is slow', I made earlier. I spent last few days debugging some plugins and learned much more about Q2A than I knew before. I think I was too hurry to say that. Q2A engine is not slow. In fact, it's rather fast and well optimized. I liked what I saw (mostly, despite some odd or obsolete from my POV coding practices, but that's inevitable in any big and long maintained project).

Nice job! Thank you!

Answer 7

My suggestions:

Exclude a category in Questions list and show up only in category page.

Answer 8

Sorry for my bad english..

sidebar show : count of un answered questions like a widget

for example : " we can answer %72 percent o total questions " like this..

i hope you understand this..

Answer 9

prohibit users to hide, edit and delete questions and answers.

Answer 10

I've tested the beta and that was really an amazing milestone. I just want to highlight some new issues that might be considered for the next upgrades if possible:

• Searching users: is it possible to add a custom search on the users page to facilitate users filtering quickly?
• redactor like editor: if the script of redacor editor could be implemented as an alternative to WYSIWYG editor, this will enhance the QA pages and make them significantly smaller in size and faster for browsing.
• Questions lists autoupdate/alert: A simple javascript auto refreshing for the QA fields is also possible but if there is a way to make it implemented in the new upgrades would make this more efficient.

I'm not good at PHP but I believe you, Scott, NoahY, and many other experts can integrate those useful tools either in the new upgrades or as a seperate addons.

Thank you for your endless support.

Comments

I want user search feature, too. In addition, we are studying Real Time Notice plugin now. V1.6 is evaluation phase now. I hope that your suggestion is realized after V1.7.

Answer 11

Can we use Google Map auto suggest API for Location???

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/reference?csw=1#Autocomplete

Example

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/places-autocomplete?csw=1

Answer 12

I'd like to be able to

Follow or ignore tags (and categories)

by setting appropriate preferences in the User Profile

http://www.question2answer.org/qa/28489/is-there-a-way-to-filter-out-follow-tags-and-categories

In SE for example the preferences in the user profile look like this:

http://mathoverflow.net/users/preferences/30967

Comments

Note that on SE, the /users/permissions page cannot be seen publicly, only you (and mods) can see it. By the way, you can follow tags and categories by clicking the star, but ignoring is not possible.