Plugin: Ask me anything or Q&A format (threaded replies)

[HAWK]

@joebuhlig Did this go ahead?

[joebuhlig]

It turned out to be too complicated to do it well at the time. Might be different now but to answer your question, no.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

This morning, I had an idea for a new approach to this that I think could work well for us.

The basic idea is to introduce a limit to how many open questions can exist at any one time. An “open question” in this case would be defined as any reply that is after the latest post by the original. So if the limit were 1, then the original poster would have to make every other post.

This would allow for a “continuous AMA” with the orgiinal poster, but with an implicit rate-limit. When they stop answering, people cannot keep asking.

Implementation-wise, there could be a custom UI behind the gear icon in the composer for a new topic to “create AMA” and set the open question limit.

Or, alternatively, perhaps it could be done via a site setting that associates a tag or category to moderate in this fashion (in which case, the open question limit would be site-wide).

ama_categories: [ask-me-anything]
ama_tags: [ama]
ama_open_question_limit: 1

What do you think?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

That is an interesting idea indeed, but would only help if the asker is being overwhelmed by replies. So it kinda depends on the velocity of the AMA.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Not overwhelming the original poster is one motivation, be it also, limit: 1 would force alternating questions and answers, which would make the stream very easy to read as well.

Anywho, I think we may try out some AMAs without any additional technical aids sometime soonish. We may never really need this feature to help. Just wanted to share the ideas…

[Mittineague]

Not that your experience will be the same or even closely similar, but these few may provide some insight as to what to expect

Topics tagged qa

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Thanks for that… Is there any post somewhere describing the “rules of engagement” for the AMAs on sitepoint?

[Mittineague]

IIRC, there weren’t any special rules.

The topic was started in advance so that others would be aware of the event - a link to a “in your timezone” site was provided in the post so others would know when it would happen

Members were allowed to post questions in advance.

The guests Trust Level was upped to exempt them from New member limitations.

I can’t speak for others, but my impression was that they went fairly well. They weren’t as “smooth” a discussion as a typical topic, but they weren’t as chaotic as a typical chat session. Kind of like “organized clutter”.

A rough analogy might be
a topic is a series of one-to-one posts
chat is a mix of many-to-many posts
the QAs were many-to-one posts.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I posted detailed advice here

Doing an AMA using Discourse

Yes, I did one here at https://community.hackernoon.com/t/x/1800 and I have three sets of advice depending on who is asking: For participants Post the following guidelines early in the topic (either in the first post or the first reply) for people to follow: Please only ask one question by replying to this topic a single time, using the blue Reply button at the bottom. It’s also helpful to scroll to the bottom while reading the topic to make sure nobody else has asked the same…

The main feature req here is still to reject topic owner replies when they do not quote the post they are replying to. That is the absolute of death here, if the AMA / Q&A subject doesn’t do that, it will be disastrous.

Some other bonus stuff we could do:

• Temporarily grant the topic owner more rights to moderate their topic during the Q&A.

• Highlight the topic owner replies more than we usually do to make them stand out more.

• Prevent people from replying more than once to the topic – since they should ask one “question” and no followups.

• Prevent people from directly replying to any posts in the topic, because they should only reply to the topic itself.

• Automatically expand “in reply to” at the bottom of replies. (Though this still leaves you unable to press the like button on the replies which I don’t… er… like.)

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Prevent people from directly replying to any posts in the topic, because they should only reply to the topic itself.

When I look at reddit they seem to be all into replying to replys and the OP sometimes follows up as well. Eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/bafikk/hello_im_an_adventurer_who_has_not_been_home_for/

Not sure if this is great or terrible, but certainly out in the wild.

Maybe far smarter auto collapsing can get us a bunch of mileage here?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Yeah, I think that back and forth model sucks. I’m not spending that much time with people asking multiple questions. Either you asked a good question and you get a reasonable answer or… well, try again next time?

[danyalamriben]

thank you this is exactly what I’ve been struggling to explain!

[Cheryl_Elizabeth]

I want to make it look like the second format. How doest that happen?

[quimgil]

@Cheryl_Elizabeth and any other future readers, see this official plugin under development:

Discourse Question Answer

This plugin is still in active development and is not production ready. Summary Discourse Question Answer allows the creation of topics in Question & Answer format. Repository Link https://github.com/discourse/discourse-question-answer Install Guide How to install plugins in Discourse Features To create a new Q&A topic toggle options in composer and select “Toggle Q&A”: [Screen Shot 2022-05-23 at 12.22.45] Here is a…

Maybe this #rfc can be closed now?