The Answers system is turning into a massive mess

[Kiran Hampal]

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.

[Dane Henson (thegreatdane)]

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.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

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.

[Danielle Foré (danrabbit)]

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?

[Craig Weber (weberc2)]

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?

[Kiran Hampal (khampal)]

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.

[Verdi R-D (azend)]

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.

[Kiran Hampal (khampal)]

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

[Craig Weber (weberc2)]

@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. :)