Setting up NodeBB for a Q&A style website

[Epigami]

Hi Guys,

First thing, love the work, NodeBB really works well and looks great.

I would like to implement NodeBB as a Q&A style forum and I imagine a few others might also be interested in doing so,

So wanted to understand if there are all the "mechanics" a Q&A forum would require (taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_software#Mechanics).

If there are settings, plugins or tickets (ie in the works) for the different aspects it would be great to add them,

Also if there are other Q&A features others think should be included.

There is the plugin created by @psychobunny https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodebb-plugin-question-and-answer, but I'm not sure if it addresses all the characteristics of a complete Q&A platform on its own.

1. Differentiate Questions & Answers
	@psychobunny plugin seems to address this, but instead of selecting "Ask a Question", can that be defaulted to all queries? 
2. Differentiate Answers (replies to the question) & Comments (replies to an answer).
	NodeBB does allow to reply a specific answer, by citing it, but here it would be like StackOverflow, where comments are small additions under the answer itself, not a post lower down on the page.
3. Vote up/down answers
	This ticket seems to address it: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/730/upvotes-downvotes-are-finally-here
4. Sort answers by votes or questions by answered status
	@psychobunny plugin seems to address this, though marked as "TODO"
5. Accept an Answer
	Not sure if this ever got implemented, but found it here https://community.nodebb.org/topic/510/select-as-best-answer/4
6. Question tagging and tag search
	Seems like a default for NodeBB
7. Mark a question as duplicate
	Couldn't find anything on this one
8. Reputation/Achievements/Badges 
	Not in the Wiki list, but gamification is quite important for QnA
	This plugin seems to address the medals https://community.nodebb.org/topic/4397/nodebb-plugin-ns-awards-ns-awards-give-medals/13
	And the scoring https://github.com/psychobunny/nodebb-plugin-cash,
	But is there any current way to get them to work together?

Essentially, how could NodeBB be made to replace ("to its best possible") StackOverflow.

It would be great to have a default Q&A option for NodeBB which would include settings and plugins relevant.

Again thanks for the awesome work.

Cheers,

Victor

[Epigami]

Bumping this up.

Does anyone have an idea regarding the missing aspects for Q&A?

If you could point me in the right direction regarding relevant tickets or plugins which might help.

Thank!

Victor

[shri]

Take a look at a wordpress plugin called Sabai Discuss. Has some really usable options to turn a site into a Q&A site.

[Epigami]

Thank for the tip shri,

Though we like nodebb because it's built on nodejs and therefore much more easily customizable than wordpress, its also a dedicated forum system which is in active development and improvement while relying on a WP plugin would mean much less new/modern features to come.

[yariplus]

Most of these don't look like they would be too hard to implement. Mostly through changes to the Q&A plugins, just open them as issues if not already there.

#2 might be an issue. There's no existing mechanism for comments that I know of. Would have to be added to core or it's own plugn.

[julian]

@Epigami Thanks for reaching out, and sorry about the delay!

If you're interested in sponsoring these upgrades to the Q&A plugin, please reach out to us at sales@nodebb.org (and reference this topic). We'd be more than happy to send over an estimate.

[A Former User]

What is Q&A?

[Fastidious]

@tanzentu said:

What is Q&A?

Questions and Answers (Q&A).

[Epigami]

@julian We would love nothing more to put into nodebb but we're still bootstrapping in our (still small) startup. I was just wondering if the different elements of a Q&A had already been implemented in one form or another in NodeBB, so we could put them together for a Q&A forum we want to provide for our users.