Is Discourse suitable for use for a question and answer type page?

I’m looking for a platform that I can use to power a Q&A section of a website. I’m already planning on using Discourse for comments throughout the site but I’ve also read on Quora (http://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-open-source-question-and-answer-web-platform-like-Stack-Overflow) that Discourse can also be used to run a Q&A section. However I haven’t been able to find any examples. Is this correct or am I mistaken? Here’s the quote:

With the functionality like Voting and advanced tagging, it can be used as question-and-answers platform. Every feature that Stack Overflow introduced is available with Discourse to run a Question & Answers site.

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As Discourse is a rainbow system it is suitable for Q&A too. However it will need some plugin (I do not know if there is any) to work good for this purpose, at least it is needed to have

  • sorting by voting
  • limiting of replies in single thread by one author
  • subscription to new topics not posts
  • extended categories or tags filtering
  • something else.

I don’t think Discourse originally set out to be a QA forum, more of a place for free-flowing discussion. Not sure if there are plugins out there that can repurpose the interface for QA but the key thing you’d need is the ability to up/down vote.

I’ve used Discourse for almost a year now in a loose QA context, software support to be precise, works great :smile:

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I have build a plugin for that previously. It does, however, require some significant patches to the Discourse Archetype System to work. So it isn’t an easy-as-pie-install at the moment. And aside from the first it misses the other features. But yes, Discourse can definitely be made to work that way.

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Dear @lightyear thank you very much ! Do you make any installation service for money ? I would be your first customer ! :slight_smile:

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