The discussion revolves around implementing a voting system in Discourse to highlight and elevate the best answer in a Q&A format, similar to Stack Overflow. Mohammad seeks a feature to move the highest-liked answer to the top, noting that current liking functionality doesn’t differentiate or highlight the best answer. downey explains Discourse isn’t designed as a Q&A platform, but meke suggests a plugin or a ‘mini-sticky’ feature could work. Mohammad agrees, proposing a pinned post based on likes. kpfleming questions why not use Stack Overflow, while codinghorror mentions Discourse’s summarization feature and suggests open-source Q&A alternatives. Mohammad asks for links to such packages. Maestra_Powers supports adapting Discourse for Q&A, similar to how wiki topics were added. DKH references a plugin created by Shiv Kumar for marking solved answers. Finally, sam confirms that this functionality is now natively available via the post voting plugin.
My forum is a “Blogger Help Forum” where users ask questions and they receive multiple answers. Currently what we are looking for is to enable a voting system that will Move up the best answer based on Like votes it receives, similar to the one used in Stackoverflow.
Discourse has a liking system but I don’t understand its purpose. It doesn’t differentiate the best answer from the weak and neither adds some highlighting nor moves up the answer closer to the question so that new visitors may read the best answer easily without having to scroll down to read all the answers
Can we hope to get this feature in next update? @sam@jeff
There are a lot of discussions here about it … and it generally comes down to the fact that Discourse was not designed to be a Q&A system, but rather a conversation support tool.
I kind of like this feature too, but I would have to agree with downey on first glance. Maybe its a possibility to build a plugin for this type of feature? Seems reasonable and doable to alter the post order on render of the thread. However, maybe a feature such as a “mini-sticky” is appropriate for a conversation platform in that it reflects conversation elements that deserve more attention within the conversation before the conversation proceeds?
I like the min-sticky idea. I would agree to what @downey just say but a custom admin option like pinning the post with “most likes received” to the bottom of topic would surely work wonders!
There are open source Q&A packages that copy Stack and would do what you want.
Note that once a topic gets more than 50 responses you can click or tap the Summarize button to filter the posts and this does factor likes, among other things.
It was not designed to be wiki too, but now you can create wiki-topics. I think it’s a good idea to allow users create Q&A topics same way. I’m loving this aproach!
Shiv Kumar - who developed the New Relic discussion forum using Discourse (blog post here: New Relic blog post - created a plugin Solved-Button (here: Solved Button / Github) that allows the individual that asked a question to mark the correct answer.
