Welcome to the Question2Answer Q&A. There's also a demo if you just want to try it out.
+37 votes
18.5k views
in Q2A Core by
closed by

In September I plan to start working on Question2Answer version 1.5, with a view to (hopefully!) releasing it before the end of 2011.

As for previous versions, I am interested in knowing what new features would be most important to people using the platform.

So please post up to 5 prioritized feature requests in your answers below.

FYI, the following are already planned, so you can skip them in your lists, but feel free to elaborate on them if particular aspects are important to you.

  • Closing questions (due to duplication, or other reasons)
  • Optional moderation mode (admin approval before post appears)
  • Ajax-style interface for answering and commenting

Thanks and I look forward to your feedback!

Gideon

closed with the note: This version now under development.
by
This question can now be considered closed. Please see the Q2A 1.5 roadmap:

http://www.question2answer.org/qa/9322/question2answer-1-5-roadmap
by
Nice to see "closing questions" feature working, but comments are still acceptable ?
by
hybridauth is a great features to allow user registration with other social accounts than just facebook .

45 Answers

+2 votes
by
1. Tiny and beautiful embedded editor for questions/answers like one at StackOverflow site

2. Advanced user profiles with great design and maybe some sort of social features like those that we see at Facebook and Twitter.

3. New powerful template system to create cool Q2A sites based on different styles

4. I have a problem with e-mails in Russian that Q2A sent to users - messages have unreadable characters

5. Ability to work with plain ASCII urls, cause I must use custom PHP code to decode russian URLs into ASCII symbols.
by
@Ambix i don't understand, Q2A already has a powerful template system. :)
Do you mean implement something on it? :)
by
1. There is my Markdown plugin at http://codelair.co.uk/2011/markdown-editor-plugin-q2a/
3. You'll have to provide more details, what needs to be changed from the current system?
5. I thought v1.4 had an option for this?
+2 votes
by
Possibility to add a custom field to the ask-question form, which you can use in the questions loop.

XML feed of all pages (hot, unanswered, all activity, etc) with only the questions, without the comments.

Advanced search, i.e. search in title, search in content, search in tag, search in custom field, et cetera.

Button in adminpanel to allow or disallow search engine robots
+3 votes
by
Experts:

I think site admin must be able to separate users as normal users and experts:

-Experts Directory, Ability Of Search with some criteria...
+5 votes
by

Bookmark Questions
Ability to mark questions as your favorites so that you can find them easily again later.

Create Tips
If someone wants to share theire knowlege with "tips" instead of questions. Those can be seperated that on tips-site you get related tips list.

Send Newsletter
To your users, they can have the option to unsubscribe.

Comments on Pages
Users should be able to comment or rate the content of "pages"
 

by
+1 create tips
+1 bookmark question
by
+1 create tips
by
+1 for Newsletter/Unsubscribe
+2 votes
by

When you type a question if it could start to show similar questions as you type instead of when you click out of the box. like http://www.quora.com/

that would be a really nice feature

+10 votes
by
edited by

Ajax and moderation will be hugely valuable!  I echo the others who have thanked Gideon for developing this project.

My top suggestions:

HTML Templates - I have spent about 2 weeks, full time, customizing Q2A to fit my site's particular needs and the biggest portion of that time has been dealing with themes.  Currently, layout is determined within the structure of theme functions, which makes it hard to do simple things like "display the upvote button on the left of the question and the down vote button on the right".  Silly example, but you get the point.  Both buttons are included in a single larger function (qa_html_theme_base::voting) that assumes they will always appear together.  Changing this default behavior is not easy.  It would be so much faster to have HTML templates so that I could edit the structure of the markup without worrying about.  For the purpose of bringing Q2A forward to the point where it can achieve really wide adoption, I think this is the most important thing you can do.
 

Featured questions - Formspring.me has gotten great user engagement from "Questions of the day" that they write and feature on the site and in daily emails to users.  I think this could be a powerful way to help Q2A sites grow.  In the early days when there are few questions, this can give people something fun to do on the site.

 
Act as Admin - I would like to be able to take actions as the site itself.  This would help provide consistent branding and would fit nicely with featured questions.  Formspring.me also does a nice job of using this technique to provide an "official" feel to certain activity.
 
Avoid Global variables, use Classes / inheritance to make Q2A more extensible - Global variables make it tough to integrate Q2A into existing sites.  It's also tough to tweak the behavior of particular functions that aren't in the themes.  There is no way to easily overwrite them so you have to make inline changes that make upgrading difficult.  If everything were in a class that would automatically look for it's extension (as qa_html_theme_base already does) it would be so much easier to hack changes into the system.
 
Bookmark / follow Questions & People - pretty simple idea
 
Github - I agree with above commenters that this would help a lot, though I understand the reasons it might not happen.
 
Also valuable would be:
 
Badges - there are well-established models out there.  The trick would be to make it easy for developers to write their own criteria for new badges, as you have already done with titles.  (The difference is that titles replace earlier titles, whereas badges accumulate)
 
More email tools - As an admin, I would like to be able to email everyone who is involved with a question.  Others have had good suggestions here too.

**EDIT**

Location tags - I think location tagging could also be extremely valuable for many Q2A sites.  Ideally, we could auto-tag questions with the user's location (which would be part of the external users integration) but also allow people to change / modify the location tag for a given question.  Facebook has started doing this for status updates and it is generating a tremendously valuable dataset for them.  

by
Yes, HTML templates would be so interesting.
by
I guess Gideon do not integrates a HTML Template system because that would break the plugins layers. :)
by
+1 for HTML themes. Maybe add HTML themes and integrate  them somehow with plugin layer ?
+1 for Badges.
+1 vote
by
can it stand for  edit TAG that user or manage can add tag description , make it become a wiki ,
0 votes
by
notification

@someone
0 votes
by

Add index.php in QA folders to prevent from file listing. My working code:
<?php
    header('Location: ../'); // To prevent folder inspection
?>

by
That's a problem with your server, you shouldn't be listing files in a directory. And anyway, you're using a public open source application, everyone already knows what's in the folders!
+1 vote
by

The User Points are calculted on the basis of the Questions they ask, Answers they give, and Votes they receive.

If the Moderator wants to reward a User for say, Best Question in a week, there should be an "offset" type of field in the Database, where plugins can add values, which get directly added to a User's Score, after the Calculation.

by
I am not sure though if there are any inherent problems with that, which violates the Basic Principles of Q2A?
+1 vote
by
Google Captcha needs to be replaced
by
Replaced with what? And what is the problem with the current CAPTCHA?
by
google captcha is hard to read. a shorter captcha will be much better and less discouraging for the user...
by
I agree for non english people re-catpcha is hard to read thing, would be much easier and better to be security question possible wich can be set by admin.
+3 votes
by
Every time I answer or comment, the page reloads and changes view and I wonder where am I? I think you should use toogle window for this issue
by
This will probably be fixed as part of the "Ajax-style interface for answering and commenting" that Gideon mentioned. I also noticed that if you post a comment on a long answer with several comments, it jumps the page to the top of the answer and your comment is not visible off-screen.
...