What are the top priorities for version 1.3?

Question

In October I plan to start working on the next version of Q2A.

Please list your top 5 priorities for changes or features you would like to see.

Thanks!

[I just changed the title of this question to clarify it refers to the previous version.]

Comments

My suggestion is when user posting a link(his own site) in question/answer, always those links should open in new window.

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From my little experience online, the greatest treat/limitation of sites like question and answer is the big man SPAM. And I'm amazed that this has been a top priority here:

1. Report As SPAM, for every Q&A.

Well for my, I think one of the "Must" feature is the ability for user report any question or answer as spam. Maybe a little "report as spam" button after the "comment/reply" buttons will be invaluable. Moderation such site can be a daunting but I think having the user suggest what they think should be moderated will make it work or moderating a lot more easier.

2. Subcategory

I can see that this has already been suggested before but I just have to reiterate the need. Because it's very "crucial". The importance of "Subcategories" in the organization of a site like this can never be over emphasis. While trying to see the importance of this, I checkout most of the top Q&A sites and they are all making use of subcategories, even check out some other type of site that has to with category organization, they all adopted "subcategories"; eBay, amazon etc.

Answer 1

I feel below top 5 features should be on priority.


Social Networking - To get more traffic
1. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and openid signup

User Profiles - To make it more personal
2. custom profile fields
3. User titles
4. Avatars

5. WYSIWYG editor for QA and to edit pages.


[edit] updated feature preference.

Comments

Thanks for responding. What do you mean by "user titles"?

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Gideon: custom user titles which can be defined by admin(like junior member, senior member, etc). these titles/ranks can be derived from user point. something similar to vBulletin forum user titles.

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/user_titles

more details and your views are in this thread.
http://www.question2answer.org/qa/1737/what-is-on-the-roadmap

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Thinking about my unexperienced users I am not a friend of gravatars as unique avatar solution, people would have to need sign up there again. I really prefer an internal solution, may be gravatars could be optional for more experienced users.

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It would be quite nice to set permissions based on user points, too.

Answer 2

I've thought of 5 now but maybe I'll change my mind later ;)

1. Extensions! As I mentioned in a previous question. I think you can do it like this: (1) each plugin is one PHP script, they live in the "plugins" folder; (2) each file has a function that does some functionality or displays something using Q2A functions; (3) each file also 'registers' those functions to run at a specific place; (4) put in several points in the Q2A code where the plugin functions are called, e.g. before a question or answer is displayed (say, replace certain words) or in the sidebar.

2. Remove constant POST-ing just to display forms. A bit of Javascript could easily display the form, then use POST as normal to submit the content. (Also, after a POST you should redirect back to the question to prevent the browser warning on page reload). Maybe switch to a Javascript library like jQuery? It's not that heavyweight (especially since your own code using jQuery is minimal) and it would make development so much easier.

3. EDIT: Remembered my most annoying one - allow multiple sessions on different computers, simultaneously! If I log in from a different computer my first session gets logged out :(

4. Inline moderating. This would be particularly useful for tagging since users on my site often make typos or put irrelevant tags. So on the question list and the question itself, you could add/edit/delete the tags. Would be nice for titles too, if we can do it without cluttering the UI.

5. Delete hidden posts *with* dependants. In other words, if an answer is hidden, upon running the deletion script it would delete that answer's comments (hidden or not) then delete the answer.


Bonus: You may already be considering this, but an option to set the default for "Email me" (checked/unchecked) would be nice :)
Plus I'll put in another request for lowercase HTML tags. Also moving all HTML output into the theme so we don't have to modify core files.

Answer 3

1. WYSIWYG editor or some other mark up tool bar, with image / flash insert
2. Plugin / module system (to include Math like Tex or Latex, and so on)
3. Implement Google Transliteration API (so that one canAttachments type in some other language)
4. Ready single sign in and integration with Drupal, Wordpress, and Jommla.
5. Attachments.

Comments

WYSIWYG editor, oh yes! I need this too!

Answer 4

I'm very happy with current version itself.
If we can add some functionalities to increase user base it will be more helpful.

1) Google, Facebook, Twitter, and openid signup - Most important :)
2) Sitemap
3) Markdown editor - for bold, underline, image, bullets and so on, to increase readability of the content
4) Badges - Someone here said, it will increase users
5) Reducing pageloads by using ajax or jqueries for adding questions or answers.

Answer 5

1. The text editor and photo adding.
2. Temporary ban.
3. A miniavatar.
4. Ranks of users.
5. Experts in categories (assignment of the expert only for ONE category)

P.S. Excuse for the bad English.

Comments

What do you mean by "ranks of users"? You can see them on the users page, for example http://www.question2answer.org/qa/users

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Example of ranks:
1. The pupil - 100-500 points
2. The student - 501-1000 points
3. The professor - 1001... Points.

Example. On categories.
Category: Politics - professor Alzim (1001 points in a category Politics)
Category: Business - pupil Alzim (105 points in a category Business)

Points are calculated the general and on categories.

P.S. Excuse for the bad English.

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This looks similar to User titles feature which I mentioned above. more details in this thread
http://www.question2answer.org/qa/1737/what-is-on-the-roadmap

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I like usertitles and userrank, especially to have points related to categories or tags/topics. This would offer to every user to be somewhere on the local leaderboard. The top positions per category / tag could be shown on his usersite..

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Another example: http://vopros.qhub.com/awards/

Answer 6

I feel very lucky with the q2a provided actually, but new options are welcome.

Its very spontaneous, may be I add some more later, but the following 5 are important to be at same level as several competitors or competing sites. I grouped them a little bit. Most are named by other members already..

a) Facebook Login (twitter, open id)
with highest possible level of data exchange between platforms.

b) Advanced User options
including in first place avatars, usertitles/userrank and a simple private message or private question which only shows up of a special users profile (just to contact a member privately). Badges as well would be fine.
Later groups could be helpful, assigned experts, and a automatic email system related to all news of a category, tag or group, where one can subscribe to.

c) Extended categories
Categories are very well accepted by the people, I asked.
But we would need at least two levels (better 3 or 4), to handle a minimum of 200 or 300 categories..as it is now, it is not sufficient for larger communities.
I saw a q2a site from germany with about 100.000 questions. Check: www.frageee.de

d) Topusers / providers
on daily, weekly, monthly, alltime base with tabs
I imagine a sidebar box, showing the 5 category related top users, the first with big avatar. And tabs at this box with today - this week - this month alltime.

e) There is one thing what I would like personally very much, the possibility to have related tags (i asked about before). With this I mean to get the weighted tags / topics of all related questions to a given question or tag and showing the top 20 of them.

and older feature suggestion;

f  ;) Points for question tagging
Everybody can tag questions up to the tags limit lets say 5, admin and questionowner can rechange the tags.

EDITED:

(   old d)
Media upload, Pictures at least
The option to include automatically resized pics into question details and answer field. I am not a friend of a full featured editor, I woud prefer a simple field like, ADD A PICTURE TO QUESTION / ANSWER . A full featured editor should please be optional. )




Hope this was not too long
monk333

Argghhhh, forgot one very important thing. Getting rid of the backspace F5 warnings, to make it liquid for any user...

Comments

I forgot one very important:

Flag questions or answers.

Actually 2 days ago I asked a question here, about iframes, there is an answer with an link to some spam world.

It would really be helpful to have a FLAG option, best would be to hide a question or answer after, lets say three flags automatically.

As admin one not always can review all the new questions and answers, and through flagging there would be a good chance to eliminate spammy posts later / automatically.

Answer 7

These are mentioned above but I wanted to lodge my vote for:

1) Twitter, facebook, openid integration
2) Sitemap

Social integration would be huge and push q2a from a great script to an amazing one. It would help us promote our sites and in turn promote Q2A.

At this stage of the game, social integration is everything.  I'm hiring a coder to do the integration but it would be better to get it in the script.

Comments

1. WYSIWYG editor or some other mark up tool bar, with image / flash insert
2. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and openid signup
3.Badges - Someone here said, it will increase users
4.Reducing pageloads by using ajax or jqueries for adding questions or answers.
5.custom titles URL fields.

Answer 8

Posting images on questions and answers would be great, including thumbs of the images on the list of questions.

Answer 9

1. WYSIWYG editor or some other mark up tool bar, with image / flash insert
2. Badges
3. Better Search, Full-text-search
4. custom profile fields
5. Sticky Questions
6. Change Login/register GET Variable "?to=" to POST http://www.question2answer.org/qa/login?to=2638%2Fwhat-are-the-top-priorities-for-version-1-3-1-4 because google indexes these pages..
7. Export all email adresses from Admin interface
8. auto-redirect users from http://www.question2answer.org/qa/2638/i-can-write-whatever-i-want-here to correct adress: http://www.question2answer.org/qa/2638/what-are-the-top-priorities-for-version-1-3-1-4
9. Make Question2Answer Open Source.
10. Open all external Links in new Tab
11. Pagination for "All Activity"/"Homepage"
12. Pagination for Tags just broken on my site.

Comments

Some good points there, although you can do some of this already.

3. Can you be more specific? The search seems OK to me. By "full text search" do you mean searching for specific phrases in quotes like on Google?

5. I think with plug-ins you will be able to do things like "most popular questions" etc.

6. Google can work out perfectly well that the "to" parameter should be ignored. However, if you register for Google Webmaster Tools you can tell Googlebot to ignore specific parameters. For me it had already decided that "to" should be ignored.

7. You can get this from the database easily (the qa_users table, e.g. using phpMyAdmin).

8. I think that was asked before and it wasn't simple to do IIRC. You might like to add a "canonical" tag to the questions: http://www.question2answer.org/qa/1153/description-meta-keywords-front-page-then-related-questions#a1642

10. "Open in new tab" is so outdated. Personally I think you should let users decide how to open pages. However this is another thing that should be possible with a plug-in.

12. Tags has pagination, see http://www.question2answer.org/qa/tags. Maybe something broke on your install?

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thx for your comment.

3. i think search finds only words separated by space. if you look at this question for example: http://guteantwort.com/4858/%23followerpower-irgendeine-idee-desktop-hintergrund-bild and search for "Desktop" http://guteantwort.com/search?q=desktop it doesnt find the question, because desktop is only mentioned in "Desktop-Hintergrund-Bild?^^"

6. yes, you are right, i also see it ignored in webmaster tools now... :)

7. yes, i know, was just a suggestion for easier usage :-)

8. i already use the canonical tag - i'am requesting this, because i have many backlinks only pointing to http://www.question2answer.org/qa/1153 because i use this short version for shorter twitter links.

12. i mean pagination for a single tag. if you look at http://guteantwort.com/tags you see the tag iphone is used 64x, but you can only find the first 20 questions on http://guteantwort.com/tag/iphone

edit: 12. ok, you are right.. there is also pagination on single tag pages... just not on my site :D seems broken, yes...

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#3 looks like a bug. You could report it to gidgreen using the feedback form, or ask it as a question here.
#8 I agree, I think "canonical" should be included by default. A redirect it not necessary IMO.

Answer 10

My top pick, and only thing that really really bothers me:
- Some way of making questions and answers rich text. Could be markdown, filtered html, simple wysiwyg. Could allow as little as bold, italic and hyperlinks. Maybe underline and bullets.  Could be just infrastructure that can be used with plugins.

- User badges.

Answer 11

Badges.
I'm waiting for them in order to use Q2A.

Comments

Really darkhorn? Badges are the sole feature stopping you from using Q2A? I mean, badges would be a nice addition but they are not vital to the script at all. All the basics for Q&A are there already.

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People tend to not contribute when they do not have something in return.

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Hmm, perhaps. But I've found that my members like getting the points so there is still incentive.

Answer 12

1) Very need WYSIWYG editor. You should add a photo / video and have the text formatting.
2) Insert the avatar / gravatar.
3) The title of users.