What is the future of question2answer?

Question

I ask this question because of my curiosity and my observations. Question2answer lacks many essential plugins and themes. Even, the few available plugins are still in their beta version and not stable. Updates are also very slow and new plugins are not created. At least, question2answer should be aiming for the sky and try as much as possible to be close to quora. I'm saying this because I love this wonderful script and fear that it might not withstand the test if time. So, what is the future of question2answer?

Answer 1

I agree. Some major features are lacking including notifications, ability to tag users etc. On my site I somehow manage these but this should be a general feature for Q2A. As Scott is busy with his work I wonder why we cannot have a Donate option and let Scott or Pupi devote some of their paid working time also to Q2A. I do not think we need any major revamp - but timely maintenance and upgrades would really be cool. I'm not a PHP developer at the level of these two people but can still take care of maintaining and upgrading my Q2A plugins as I also use them and I always upgrade Q2A to latest version.

Comments

I have checked that addon page recently. You guys have plugins but they are not major plugins needed. Question2answer needs to be ahead of the game. Check out other questions and answer sites and scripts and see what we are lacking here. Question2answer is just a basic question and answer script.. That's all. We need to enhance it by creating many nice themes and plugins. It really pains me that I cannot cos...

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Yes, may be. I made the plugins I needed and shared them. That's all.

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Thank you arjunsuresh. This community needs people like you. Please disturb other coders you know to help enhance this script.

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that is very good of you. Why dont you go to http://github.com/q2a/question2answer and raise your issues there.

Answer 2

@chillex, agree with you, there are many things required to improve q2a. Plugins, themes site like wordpress. Also many critical features in q2a core are also required. Scott is lead so only he can tell us when will be next release and what features are planned. I'm doing regression testing of q2a v1.8 Github version and reporting issues there. Also started testing plugins from diff developers so will list all stable/verified plugins.

Comments

Please do. I'm already thinking of destroying my question2answer site but I love the script.  Please contact Scott. I saw a post on quora criticising question2answer. That is bad. Let's make this have more plugins and themes like WordPress!

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@chillex, sorry to know that. Problem is, we need more people on dev team....level of Gideon, Scott, or pupi1985.

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I tried to raise a number of issues to scott but it seems he has certain views that are not likely to change

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Hmmmm. I'm not a developer. I  cant code

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I know Q2A core has limitations but most of the features can be made available as plugins. It is just that there are not many developers doing this for whatever reason. I have seen how to make the plugins and any one who knows coding can do this fairly easily in Q2A. I have made some critical ones for my site and whenever I get time I'll make others. But this wont be in near future as I'm tied up with other works. The point is we do not need to help of Scott or Q2A core to do 90% of the feature requests.

Answer 3

Unfortunately Q2A is a dead project. I recomend you to look at Flarum (PHP) for somenthing fresher or even better, Discourse (Ruby).

Comments

i dont agree with you. Q2A isnt a dead project!!! I know about the Flarum and Disourse projects but i believe that Q2A's structure is very flexible. I am now building a new web site based on Q2A and i have to say that is more beautiful than Flarum or Discourse. However Q2A lacks a lot of modern features, but i am sure that we all together can take this platfrom to the next level. ;)

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Agree with Marthael about status of this project. The reason of the project is dying is not a matter of program. Gideon's Q2A code is wonderful. The problem is the human problem of maintaining it. By the way, Flarum is good platform. I am also developing FluxBB, so I know  Flanz well. He is very diligent and maintains system well. Functional composition of Flarum is interesting,. However, it is slightly different from the orthodox QA system. And, function of Discourse is excellent. However, conditions of the operating environment and the development language are severe. We will need to pay attention to these point.

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@sama55 i really love Q2A functional. The reason that this project is dying is that is really lacks of some modern functions. This is how a modern forum must work:

1. After succesfull User Registration force the user to follow at least 3-4 tags.

2. Display Activity (Questions/Answers) at the home page based on the tags the user favorited.

3. A better Multi-search autocomplete field that will search for Questions, Users and Tags. like this one here: http://easyautocomplete.com/examples

4. A better Notification and Messaging System. I think that you already built a plugin for that in the past.

5. Following Users and Be Followed By Other Users. This Can be easily done by modificate the existing "Favorite User Function". I already did that with success and now i m displaying Different Pages for Favorited Questions, Favorited Tags and Users as well.

6. A new Fresh and Modern Profile Page. I also built that for my website

7. And at the end a very Good Function That will keep the users visiting again and again the site is a fucntion that will allow the user to be informed (Email or/and Onsite Notification) when a question is posted under a tag that this user already Followed.

Example: I as user "xxxxx" make a question tagged with the tag: #Sience and you are already favorited this tag. Then the system will send you a notification to you that the user
"xxxxx"  posted a question under tag #Sience so you will be able to answer at the questions/Topics you are interesting for.

I am pretty sure that if we pay attention to those features then the Q2A Platform will become ubeatable ;)

I am here to help/contribute for anything has to do with User Interface and Design. Lets do our best for this platform because it deserves the best.

I will also Post my comment as a New Topic So we can Discuss there for additions/improvements etc.