Features lacking vs other stack exchange like sites and a site admin to TALK to

Question

We are looking for best Q&A package for our needs. Were going to go w/ stack exchnge, but their area 51 process will prevent it from getting critical mass - also we want to own the site.  Expect large site quickly, as have 300 experts that will load FAQs from their sites and 10k seed emails to parties known to be interested in the field and very social.  Need ability to post photos in Questions and Answers, think badges are important, need good policing tools. 

Impressed with admin demo, but an hour just isn't enough time to check things out - am looking into whether we can do download to test.  I think a 10 minute conversation someone who has been thru the selection evaluatio process would be worth days of checking out all the options.  I'm going to take a risk and list my email, hoping someone willing to talk will email me as well as look forward to answers here. cbcollet@gmail.com Tnx

Answer 1

Like edward said you can download and test yourself: see this page. Installation is pretty quick if you already have PHP/MySQL as most servers have.

You can also see from the directory that there are many sites using the software, many with thousands of questions. I have nearly 4,000 questions on my site and many active users.

Regarding features lacking:

• There are no badges in Q2A yet. This is a popular request so hopefully will make it into the next version around March/April time.
• You cannot upload photos but you can add photos uploaded elsewhere (e.g. imgur). However with the plugin structure it should be possible to add that functionality to an editor.
• Policing tools are fairly good, you can ban users and so on.
• No edit history on posts.
• No user permissions based on points.

There are probably many other minor differences, but those are the major ones.

Comments

Thanks.  Download did go quick and easy, testing now.

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i had a wonderful experience downloading it

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Thanks.  I hadn't closed this out.  We downloaded over a month ago and have a site up now.  www.QuiltingExpertiseCo-op.org

Answer 2

You can download it and test it all you want- Question2Answer is open source. There is no selection evaluation process.

Answer 3

I wrote another SO clone, not really a clone but it has many features from SO and a bunch of features that SO does not even have. It's also in php but has much higher minimum requirements than this one, but if you have or can install php 5.3.2 or newer, you can use it.

I has all the features that I see people requesting in this forum and more.

I hope you guys don't mind me posting a link to my own project, but we are all Open source developers, there is not really a competition and hopefully we are all part of the great Open Source movement instead of competitors.

Anyway, my program still in beta, but have a look for yourself at our support site, ask around, see if this is something that may suite your needs.

I am also answering all questions on that site and currently I'm the only developer.

http://support.lampcms.com

Comments

nice, but I stick with Q2A, these guys have a vision... I feel it:) But keep working on your project. I like it because of the login possibilities, that's useful. And you are right on ur site, that q&a sites are getin more and more popular, in my opinion this is way of getting useful answers for the future few years on thr Internet. What do u think about this?

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Thanks. I'm working on it every day. There is also a grand vision for it. It will have it's own oauth or even oauth2 based API. I know it's hard to convince other people to just use the new product. That's ok, I just want people to look at it and see if they like it.

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Thanks, registered on your site and interested, but have application up and running on Q2A