Voting Up the Best Answer!

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

3 Likes

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?

2 Likes

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!

Why not just use Stack Overflow, since it was designed for this purpose?

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.

Thank you @codinghorror , the likes doubt is cleared now. Can you kindly point to the Q&A package through a link? That would be really helpful

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!

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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.

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This is now implemented natively in the post voting plugin :confetti_ball: