making "posts" instead of "questions"?

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The following suggestion isn't relevant for all askbot use cases, but perhaps many: At asksage.sagemath.org we are running something like a user support page for the software sage, and it would be nice to be able to write "questions" that are really more like "posts": people could post examples, make announcements, etc.

Having it through askbot rather than an email list would allow people to vote, comment, reply/modify, vote on replies, etc. -- these are the main reasons it made sense to switch to askbot for user support. Of course one could use "questions" to make these posts, but separating the functionality could be useful (e.g. it's fine if "posts" remain "unanswered", or if they turn into discussion threads, and it encourages users to post their good ideas even if they're not in response to a particular question).

This came up when someone did a comparison of asksage with mapleprimes, a support site for Maple which has a "post" function in addition to an "ask question" function. Of course I mentioned this on asksage too, but this seems like a more natural place to put the suggestion.

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niles

asked 2010-09-01 08:15:15 -0600

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Sure, there is a use case for announcements or posts that do not contain questions. I'd imagine that these would look like "questions" with no "answers", but with follow-up comments allowed.

I'll try to alleviate the need for threaded conversations by adding "post a follow up question", "re-post as answer" for comments and similar functions. The "linear" or "branched" discussion threads don't really work (or maybe a working format for them has yet not been found). Secondly - adding a "discussion" function in addition to Q&A will confuse people.

As for posts instead of questions - maybe it will be a low-priority experimental config option. The "main line" of this project is a strong support of a Q&A format.

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oh yes, I wouldn't ever imagine posts *instead* of questions, only in addition to.

niles (2010-09-01 13:45:09 -0600) edit

making "posts" instead of "questions"? edit

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making "posts" instead of "questions"?