elementaryweb

The Answers system is turning into a massive mess

Bug #821468 reported by Kiran Hampal on 2011-08-05

This bug affects 3 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	elementaryweb	Fix Committed	High	Unassigned	elementaryweb 2.0-alpha

Bug Description

1) Nothing is categorized or tagged. ✓
2) It's unclear what users can post and can't post. For instance, aroman recently posted that the Q&A system isnt for technical support -which has certainly confused myself. There's also too many questions about unstable software. If we fixed 1) above, then we could have a tag called unstable.
3) Half of the page is wasted by a massive ad. ✓
4) It lacks community feel. We need avatars to show up. It'd be nice to have threads (of the sticky sort) by official roles within elementary (eg khampal from the web team) asking users questions.
5) Creating Answers/Questions form is unfriendly.

See original description

Tags:

Kiran Hampal (khampal) on 2011-08-05

description:	updated
Changed in elementaryweb:
assignee:	nobody → Elementary Website Team (elementaryweb)

Revision history for this message

Dane Henson (thegreatdane) wrote on 2011-08-05:

I agree. There needs to be some more organization. I personally believe that there needs to be a search box specifically for answers, and even a FAQ category. As for what the "Answers" system is for, perhaps a guideline page would be helpful for new users.

Kiran Hampal (khampal) on 2011-08-05

tags:

added: answers

Revision history for this message

Danielle Foré (danrabbit) wrote on 2011-08-05:

This should probably be broken up into several bug reports, but:

1. I'm pretty sure there is already an open bug report for this.

2a. I'd imagine it's okay to ask anything that is actually a question. We do get a lot of bug reports there that aren't actually questions at all. This could probably be helped with a better "submit an answer" page

2b. this goes back to point 1 of course. It'd probably be good to separate questions by OS version. This would drastically reduce the number of questions presented to a user and focus them on relevant content.

3. I agree, I don't like the ad placement here.

4. The point of not showing avatars for questions and answers is that what's important is the content itself. We don't want to have power users who are voted up (or some who are ignored) just because of who they are. The actual answer is the important part.

5. I think there's already an open bug report for this too, but yes this could solve some problems.

Revision history for this message

Danielle Foré (danrabbit) wrote on 2011-08-18:

Answers Edit (221.0 KiB, image/png)

I've attached here a mockup that shows a couple things:

Way more powerful filtering:
* Split up the status and sort modes for a total of 6 different sort/view modes instead of 3
* Add a "Categories" dropdown with pre-defined categories like "Website", "Networking", "Postler", etc. We can add them as we go and make sure the categories make sense.

Wider question boxes:
These just about fill up the page, with even spacing on the left and right side.

Thoughts?

Kiran Hampal (khampal) on 2011-08-22

tags:

added: new-answers

Kiran Hampal (khampal) on 2011-08-22

Changed in elementaryweb:
status:	Confirmed → In Progress

Kiran Hampal (khampal) on 2011-10-18

description:

updated

Kiran Hampal (khampal) on 2012-04-12

Changed in elementaryweb:
status:	In Progress → Fix Committed

Kiran Hampal (khampal) on 2012-04-27

Changed in elementaryweb:
milestone:	none → 0.3b

Kiran Hampal (khampal) on 2012-04-27

Changed in elementaryweb:
importance:	Critical → High

Curtis Hovey (sinzui) on 2012-05-14

Changed in elementaryweb:
assignee:	Registry Administrators (registry) → nobody

Revision history for this message

Craig Weber (weberc2) wrote on 2012-05-20:

Out of curiosity, why didn't Elementary go with a StackExchange site? It seems like it has all the necessary Elementary functionality and then some while being incredibly well-organized. Is it not open source?

Revision history for this message

Kiran Hampal (khampal) wrote on 2012-05-20:

The process of getting a stackexchange site seems lengthy - you first have to propose it. I don't think the source is open.
Also having our own answers section enables us to integrate it better into the site.

Revision history for this message

Verdi R-D (azend) wrote on 2012-05-20:

You could go with another open source StackExchange alternative such as http://www.osqa.net . It'd need retheming but I think it provides all the basic functionality that StackExchange does.

Revision history for this message

Kiran Hampal (khampal) wrote on 2012-05-20:

We could, but the new answers system is pretty much complete. :P I don't see why we'd need to move now.

Revision history for this message

Craig Weber (weberc2) wrote on 2012-05-21:

@Kiran: I didn't realize they weren't open. That explains why there are so few. I don't know what the new Answers system will have in store, so I'll have to wait and see; however, without doubting the caliber of the web-dev team's work, I would think it would be extremely hard to build in the robustness of the s/e sites within a few iterations of the answers system. There's just a lot to them and the entirety of their featureset works together to serve their very clear, knowledge-sharing purpose. That said, I'm excited to see what is to come with the new Answers system. :)