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

Hi gid, you know my wishlist: http://www.question2answer.org/qa/19042/
Thanks for your work, Kai

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It seems that people want some of NoahY's plugins integrated as core. Esp. notifications for new events, which is actually solved by the history plugin.

See graphic here: http://www.question2answer.org/qa/?qa=blob&qa_blobid=2822172757103700446

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+1
- for a REST-style API

- Merging accounts, e.g. no duplicates between facebook and internal accounts which may happen now if someone accidentally logs in via fb.

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hi, that's all what you do nothing, make an option to pay for questions, and the expert gets the money.

then your software is number 1

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I agree with you this feature (pay per question) will be the best add on to q2a.

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An ability to remove number from URL or at the least move it to the end.

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I think from all suggestions the "new events"-notifications - as in NoahY's history plugin - should actually be n°1.

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1/Move the content ID to the end of the URL would be nice.
2/Is there an abstraction of the DB class that would allow for caching? (via an APC/Memcached plug-in)
3/A dev mode with some performance probes would be great (may be that exists?)
4/Full page caching would be nice (although that could be a plug-in)

Thanks!

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Hi Gideon,

Can you please be a bit more specific about the release?

"the first half of 2013" --> any change it will be ready as soon as February?

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When checking /updates/ again, which displays: All my updates | My favorites | My content

I thought we could have a 1-to-1 match for each favorite "category" we have, this would make it easier to understand, e.g.:

All Updates | Favorite Tags | Favorite Users | Favorite Q+A

Maybe the first step to improve it...

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Gideon, can you update the git repo as you go along? I think I mentioned elsewhere that you could set up a branch for 1.6 and put all changes on that, then merge back in later. If you're unfamiliar with the concepts have a read through http://git-scm.com/book/ it explains the whole of Git really well.

Also, are you open to pull requests? I could help with a few parts if you like, such as improving the JavaScript.

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@Scott: Don't know if putting beta-versions on github is a good idea. Many people download from github thinking this is the latest version (released!)...

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And one more reason to not git beta-versions which is even more important: Having many core hacks, I updated from 1.5.3 to 1.5.4 by checking the differences / code changes in the commit: https://github.com/q2a/question2answer/commit/2c67b77c7121919030354029b001f2b8ae5d8eec and changing my code step by step from file to file.

This github commit 'history' is necessary for manual updates! And a great changelog tracker.

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@Kai: Not if you have a branch set up. The "master" branch still contains the stable code (i.e. 1.5.4) and should be the default for anyone who downloads from Github.

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Thanks to the concept of github "branches", retrieving incorrect version accidentally shouldn't easily happen. If released branch is "master", a downloader won't even see the "beta" version unless he clicks to change to the "development" (or whatever named) branch.

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It will be good to have a feature of email subscription according to category. For any new question/answer, all the subscribed users of that category will receive an email.

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Maybe we can implement this option into v1.6:
→ hide closed questions from "Unanswered" list

Note: After implementation, we should check for correct pagination.

In memory of:
http://www.question2answer.org/qa/15799/ + http://www.question2answer.org/qa/17983/ + http://www.question2answer.org/qa/16094/

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YES, thank you gid!

Finally the "show all questions by user" issue is obsolete, yippieh!
And I love the new marking of question-favorites in question lists!

well done, congrats!

PS: What about the panels/tabs "all answers" and "all comments". Then we are done with that :)

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Adding 1 item to the to-do-list: http://question2answer.org/qa/20471/core-sets-links-user-meta-request-url-not-the-correct-q2a-one =)

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Great, thank You, the tabbed userpage is an excellent feature.
However it would be nice to have the following tabs as well in core:

-Favorite posts
to show a collection of questions, images, designs...like tumblr or designshack

-Followers
who follows this author

In a perfect world, each post would have a followers aka favorized count as an alternative to the like counts. In tumblr for example a user can repost an item what is the same as favorize something on q2a, The importance of an post there or a question here is/would be  measured by the favorized count.

However many many thanks for the already added functionallities.

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...so smooth !!!! I can find very old questions of mine now...

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I have just installed 1.6 like fav status on question list title. Its nice. One thing was thinking for user page as who is vising the user page they already know where they are so "User" word can be removed from the sub-menu item's

Means currently title is as
User admin
Recent user activity
All user questions

Instead of that it can be like
Admin
Recent activity
All questions

There is a page time which tells visitor where they are or which user's profile they are viewing.

This is just my thought. after all you are the best judge

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Thanks for the update, gidgreen.

"Make it clear why each item is listed in the user updates page" ... I guess you mean the questions' subs, such as "your answer commented". → I recommend to make this item more visible as this is the main item of interest on this page. First I'd remove the vote|answers|views count, second I would put the update item at this position :) maybe a *list* like the liveticker but with your Snow theme styling: http://www.gute-mathe-fragen.de/liveticker

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Addition to improving the "Recent Activity" list: This could be done by only using CSS, try this CSS for instance on my activity page http://www.question2answer.org/qa/user/echteinfachtv+%28Kai%29/activity

.qa-q-item-stats {
  display:none;
}
.qa-q-item-what {
  font-size:15px;
  color:#35F !important;
}

Only thing missing if there is "commented" ... *who* commented. Maybe we should write "you commented" or the username "Scott commented" if somebody else is seeing the site. This would need a is_by_user-switch.

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Installed it and it seems to work error free so far, I woud like to show the all questions and all answers tab on my MY ACCOUNT page as well so that it reads:

MY DETAILS | MY FAVORITES | MY QUESTIONS | MY ANSWERS

Perfect would be to have the USERS WALL or MY WALL as well on an own tab. It is much easier to understand and userfriendly.
However, if not possible in this version, at least it would be great to have a simple way to modify through advanced theme without having to wait for a plugin.

As well the Followers list would be great on both, the MY and the USERS page. ( Followers are the the favorite users. ) So that it finally reads:

USERS PAGE:

USER NAME | WALL | RECENT ACTIVITY | ALL QUESTIONS | ALL ANSWERS | FOLLOWERS | DOES FOLLOW

and

MY ACCOUNT PAGE:

MY DETAILS | MY WALL | MY UPDATES | MY FAVORITES | MY QUESTIONS | MY ANSWERS | MY FOLLOWERS

Having many followers as well is kind of a reputation factor and it is a significant feature for a social community.

However, excellent work so far !!!

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+1 for having the WALL on a tab instead in the main userpage. And *optional* / option in admin panel.

And I agree to "merge" user-activity page and account page. You can see, by the way, that "User echteinfachtv (Kai)" has the same content as "MY DETAILS". My Details is just edit mode. It is kind of redundant (after merging) to have both. It would be sufficient to have the page "User echteinfachtv (Kai)" plus a button "EDIT MY PROFILE".

I remember some discussions about improving the overall user items navigation. Maybe we should find those posts again.

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Yes, I like having a MY PROFIL Button in the menu, but it could link to more or less the same "user page". But as everybody has different needs for his project, the veryyyyy best would be to split everything up in tabs like updates, latest activity, favorites, profile, all questions, wall and what ever and than allow through admin menu which tabs to show on which page. User page or my profil page. The user page is the public one, so there the single user or at least the admin should have the choice what he wants to become public to which user group.

However, having one own and one user page which holds all the content through tabs may be the final solution and would be highly competitive to other community scripts.

One answerer here recommended to send logged in users to their wall or their own page, this I as well like a lot as an option in admin menu.

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I can't wait for this to be complete. Do you have a time when this will be complete?  Love it if you can enable LDAP integration as well.

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The file qa-url-test.php
(dated Feb3, 2013, contained in the zipfile)
appears to contain a typo (omission)
in the line which reads: echo td /tr /table

Over in qa-app-admin.php, the function qa_admin_url_test_html()
does not output a forward slash character necessary for creating the td closing tag.

FWIW, this typo seems to have been present since q2a version 1.4

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Can you make the voting plugin to allow people that are not loged in to vote?

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Q2A Version: 1.6-dev-0213
When user is blocked, error occurs.
qa-include/qa-page-user-profile.php(L539) undefine $questions

[replace (L45-54) ]
    @list($useraccount, $userprofile, $userfields, $usermessages, $userpoints, $userrank, $questions, $answerqs, $commentqs, $editqs, $favorite)=
        qa_db_select_with_pending(
            QA_FINAL_EXTERNAL_USERS ? null : qa_db_user_account_selectspec($handle, false),
            QA_FINAL_EXTERNAL_USERS ? null : qa_db_user_profile_selectspec($handle, false),
            QA_FINAL_EXTERNAL_USERS ? null : qa_db_userfields_selectspec(),
            QA_FINAL_EXTERNAL_USERS ? null : qa_db_recent_messages_selectspec(null, null, $handle, false),
            qa_db_user_points_selectspec($identifier),
            qa_db_user_rank_selectspec($identifier),
            qa_db_user_recent_qs_selectspec($loginuserid, $identifier, qa_opt_if_loaded('page_size_user_posts')),
            qa_db_user_recent_a_qs_selectspec($loginuserid, $identifier),
            qa_db_user_recent_c_qs_selectspec($loginuserid, $identifier),
            qa_db_user_recent_edit_qs_selectspec($loginuserid, $identifier),
            (isset($loginuserid) && !QA_FINAL_EXTERNAL_USERS) ? qa_db_is_favorite_selectspec($loginuserid, QA_ENTITY_USER, $handle) : null
        );

[Add (L117)]
//    Get information on user references in answers and other stuff need for page
    $pagesize=qa_opt('page_size_user_posts');
    $questions=qa_any_sort_and_dedupe(array_merge($questions, $answerqs, $commentqs, $editqs));
    $questions=array_slice($questions, 0, $pagesize);
    $usershtml=qa_userids_handles_html(qa_any_get_userids_handles($questions));
    $usershtml[$userid]=$userhtml;

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I see Google recently release + site sign in
https://developers.google.com/+/features/sign-in
I would love this to be implemented as a mainstay or separate plugin, thanks for considering.

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I'm not sure if this suggestion has been already raised.
Can you add the auto-alert/refresh about new questions/contributions just as the "http://math.stackexchange.com/" does?
There you will find an alert if the list of questions is updated and you have the ability to update that list without the need to refresh the page.
Great thanks.

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Hey Gidgreen, I think that there needs to be an option to moderate questions/answers with links in them or even allow links only when users have an certain amount of points. Spammers are targeting these sites which I think will grow as more spammers catch on.

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@VdoubleE I could add this feature to my Akismet plugin .. might not be able to get it done till the end of the week though.

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@DaveH If you could do that it would be awesome it's very much needed! Thanks for replying me also.

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@VdoubleE I sent a PM your way with a link to download the new beta - let me know if you did not receive it.

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@DaveH Thank you! I will test it out any problems I will PM you thanks again!

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how much time need the too the 1.6 release, and how to upgrade from 1.5.3 to 1.6?

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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 suggestions:

1. Separate "experts" from normal users and add a section "experts". Filter experts by location or expertise (categories).  Show Best Experts under categories according to their points.

2. Allow ask question privately or puclic. When asking private questions and after selecting a category show for example 5 best experts to be ask and enable to asker to ask one or more expert at the same time. (I know there is a plugin but I think this feature must be a part of q2a).

3. In experts profile show answers statistics. For example:10 private answers --20 public answers

Thanks for all your efforts.

Comments

+1 for #1 about experts.

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Yes. Category/Tag specific experts would be useful.

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vbulletin or other foruming apps are more suitable for per-category groups / permissions. Example: for a "request for quotes" subforum, create an "RFQ experts" (or whatever) usergroup and only assign vetted (and / or paid) users to that group. Members of this special group can read/reply to any thread in the subforum, but all other logged in users can only start new threads and read the content of threads they started. Vendors (experts) may choose to compete by posting, or may elect to present their proposal via private message. Site staff is not expected to intervene nor adjudicate any disagreements which may arise between the parties.

In regard to trust / reputation, how reliable would you (as a site owner, or as a participant) expect the list of "5 best experts to ask" to be? Shilling, gaming... it's a long row to hoe, a razor's edge for the site owner, especially if participants are engaging monetary transactions.

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#1 experts would be nice feature!

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testing ~~ this topic is marked "closed 3 days ago".
In this closed topic, I was permitted to EDIT my previously posted comment.

Answer 2

Sorry for my bad english..

1 - Login tab : users can choose login type. Example : facebook, twitter, vkontakte etc..

2 - Additional fields : admin can choose it to only admin can see.. Example : telephone number. only admin can see this.

Thanks for all your efforts.

Answer 3

A lot of people have been asking for better image controls so I think what would be great is a more general image upload plugin/API. I see there is qa-wysiwyg-upload.php in the WYSIWYG editor plugin - if I was to use that for the Markdown editor I would be copy-pasting a whole bunch of logic and permissions-checking that could be done automatically in the core. This could then be used by any plugin, say a plugin to allow a user profile image or whatever.

Also along with this it would be great to have an option to upload files to the filesystem instead of the database (e.g. a qa-uploads folder, perhaps structured by month/year like Wordpress). Also, resizing images.

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Q2A is getting targeted by spammers now so I think some better spam control is necessary. A few options to consider:

• Run posts through Akismet.
• Allow admins to specify keywords to mark post as spam or send post for approval (i.e. instead of having to create a plugin).
• Addition to the filter plugins to be able to send a user account for "approval" - e.g. if multiple accounts sign up from the same IP or the username/profile contains certain words.

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Regarding the My Updates: it would be good to have an icon at the top that shows a number of replies/messages you've received, like on forums. Something like this. I would not include "updates to favorites" in that number, just post replies, private and public messages. On this subject it would be nice if private messages worked more like forums too. We have the PM store, but it only shows when you go to send a PM to that user. A basic page listing all recent PMs would be better IMO.

Can we also make the censor apply to user profiles as well as regular posts? Plus the public/private messages of course.

Edit: a request from my users - listing the exact join date in the user profiles. "2 years ago" is quite wide-ranging. I'd suggest something like "Member for: 2 years (joined 01 Jan 2011)"

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I'd love to see unobtrusive Javascript. I posted about it here, it's much better practice to have one script block that adds all events to elements than use onmouseover, onclick etc. And using jQuery's event handlers prevents issues like this. And also Kai's suggestion to keep the hover effects in CSS. There is no need to have JS events for that, I don't think we need IE6 support any more (and IE can just have graceful degradation anyway). I'm happy to help with any of this if you need!

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The ability for plugins to list privileges on a user's page would be a bonus, for example "Banning users from chat" or "Creating new tags". In fact, hooking into most tables in Q2A is a PITA.

Also on the subject of privileges, I just found that only admins can edit user profiles. It would be nice if we could set that privilege and give it to moderators too.

May add more later if I think of anything...

P.S. it would be nice if you added my User Activity Plus plugin to this site, or made it core... I'm constantly trying to find old questions/answers I posted here ;)

P.P.S. It would also be great if you committed more frequently to the git repo. You can set up a branch to do 1.6 work on so that the master branch isn't polluted with incomplete code, then merge that back in when complete. Would also allow you to accept pull requests for bug fixes etc. Take a look at http://git-scm.com/book/ 

Comments

A lot of good ideas there. It might have been better to have each idea as a separate answer so we could see exactly which idea was the most popular. +1 spam +1 image plugin

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Agree with Scott suggestion!!

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image upload++

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+1,useful as reference for creating my own system

Answer 4

Anonymous Posting Process:

I think there should be a temporary registration form just below the posting form with Name, Email and Website for Anonymous Posting. [ http://www.question2answer.org/qa/19183/anonymous-posting-by-name-and-email ] So, Anonymous guys will able to select a question as a answer and make the post 'Solved' in other hand, their name will be there instead of post by Anonymous ....

Category Pages:

Way to add desription with full HTML access in category pages.

Category and Tag Subscribe:

A simple form to subscribe under categories and tags using email address.

>Easy way to add more fields in ask form

>Easy way to disable answers for a specific category

Make It More Social:

• Add a Follow button to posts, users etc
• Register using Twitter, Google, Ymail etc
• Facebook Style Notification

** Top Users Under a Tag

** User Expert Badge for his/her most contributed Tag.

Example: John is expert on 'PHP' he has 10k up-votes, and 2,020 answers in 'PHP'

Comments

+1 for the Top Users Under a Tag and Way to add desription with full HTML access in category and tags pages.

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Also +1 for Top Users in Tag

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Really? Bend the entire community-centric Q2A app to accommodate "Anonymous guys"?

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[ X ]..."Registered users only".

Answer 5

Thanks Gid! This is my suggestions:

1. Remove accents from all URLs and working with all languages

2.Bounty award for question

3. Inbox and Notifications for member, like this :

4. Limit characters of tag, works in tag so long not good for layout web.

5. Shared Users system with Wordpress

6. Login options for user with gmail, yahoo, facebook...

7. Add friends to the list on the members page, receive notification when a new activity from friends.

8. Upgrade CKEditor version 4(Standard editor is recommended) Demo. Nice plugin!

Comments

@Scott: Yes! I know! But it's not working with tags, users and categories Urls. Here : http://www.question2answer.org/qa/19496/remove-accents-from-question-urls-work-tags-user-categories

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OK that makes sense. Good suggestion.

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Thanks Scott! Thanks Q2A developer! :)

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#2, #3 and #4 seems very good features for me.
Especially featured questions (a.k.a. bounty award) is a must feature.

Answer 6

Hi gid.

Great idea.

These are mine :

• easy way to Update or upgrade to newer version from older version
• create an advaced badges (Improve current mode :If users achive a score , they can for example edit posts or create a role management by badges

 

Answer 7

And from me to be possibility to vote (optionaly) for anonimous people. Thank you!

Comments

And implementing an option: number of questions, comments, votes, edits per day for all (users and anonimous), antispam. Rechaptcha isn`t so practical and convenient.

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+ http://www.question2answer.org/qa/19748/how-to-create-limit-for-number-of-questions-per-day

Answer 8

1. Edit history

There's a plugin for that but I just can't get it to work. The idea consists in having access to every edit version of a question or answer, similar to SE.

2. Activities Log - Moderation

Every action performed by moderators and admins should be listed in a page only accessible by super admin. You can see chronologically every action of moderation, each of them followed by an UNDO button.

3. Flagging content

A small box containing the reasons to flag is missing. It should also have the option to set a limit of minimum characters.

4. Bounty

Offer a reward of additional reputation points after a number of days after the question was asked. 

5. Notifications

Email alerts can get messy quite fast. A notification on the top bar displaying the number of unread activities is a lot better, such as Facebook's.

6. Combine logins

A person who's made a regular account can add his Facebook account as a secondary login.

 

7. Pay expert to answer

Quora features an interesting way to invite experts to answer questions. Right after asking your question the page displays a list of people who've already answered something in the selected area of expertise. Some of them are free to ask, some of them require a given amount of reputation to ask.

And for the website

• Feature Suggestion Voting

A list of all suggested features, each one of them linked to a place where everyone can place their review. Every registered member can cast a +1 or -1 vote.

Comments

"1. Edit history" -- what problems are you having? Feel free to open a ticket on https://github.com/svivian/q2a-edit-history/issues?state=open

Answer 9

1. Notifications - Every time an user upvotes, comments on, or answers your question, you should receive a notification. Something similar to Facebook's would be great. This would massively increase user engagement. 
2. Change home page to 'My Updates' page if the user is logged in. 
3. Add reCaptcha to send feedback page even if user is logged in. There is a big problem with spam, especially since there is no way to enable reCaptcha for logged in users. 

Comments

I totally agree with point #1.

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"Every time an user upvotes, comments on, or answers your question, you should receive a notification"

Ouch! Careful...

my webhost has a strictly-enforced antispam policy:
If a domain sends more than 200 emails in a given hour,
the related webhosting account is automatically suspended

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I meant onsite notifications, not email ones.

Answer 10

I have some idea   to make q2a better  and different from other QA

1. Enable user to add their Portfolio on profile

2. Add as connection or friend. (enable private message if friend confirmed )

3.  Status Update like twitter or facebook with votes like in Q2A.

4. Notification for question answered, voted.

Thanks 

Comments

RE: #1 what do you mean by 'Portfolio'?

Answer 11

1. Akismet

2. Easiest Image upload with automatic width resize

3. Additionnal fields on answers. For example, I need user to add a source link on each answer and cannot easily add it without programming. There is extra fields on user profile, easy to configure. It would be fine ta have the same on question and answer.

4. IMHO for mobile , a good responsive theme is simplest, usefull and faster than developping an API.

5. Ask users to describe only one idea or request per answer on this question, so we can vote and see most expected functionnalities ;)

Thank you very much to all devs for this great and usefull tool!

Answer 12

 

- My suggestion is that 'facebook login' module should be improved. When the users logged on to the existing 'facebook login' module, the log on data extracted from the facebook are recorded on a database which is alright. However, when the user that logged on through 'facebook login' logs out, the facebook session is terminated.

 

My suggestion: The facebook session should not be terminated but only the site session when the user logs out through 'facebook login' module.

 

- On the other hand, links embedded in the site seem to be 'nofollow'.

 

- We are can be created special pages within the site(in Admin Panel -> Pages). However, the tags can not be added to these pages.

Please fix them. Thanks.
 

Comments

the facebook logout module even from facebook terminates the connection with your site and facebook always.. once a user has authorized your site, as long as they are logged in on facebook, facebook issues your site an authorization token which helps users from having to click "login" when returning to your site.