Sorting by votes, to replace help.osm.org

[Tordanik (Tobias Knerr)]

Splitting this off from marking topics as solved:

@hfs

In the help category, it would be great if posts in a topic could be sorted by likes, and not only chronologically. This would allow casual visitors to get answers quickly and to avoid to read discussion and comment posts.

It sounds like one would need a plugin to accomplish this? Discourse Post Sorting Customizer - plugin - Discourse Meta . Are plugins an option in this instance?

[InsertUser]

@cquest

@hfs

Again, there seems to be a plugin for this: Discourse Solved (Accepted answer plugin) - plugin - Discourse Meta

It is already installed

This doesn’t mention thread sorting by votes like the old help site. Do we have a separate plugs n installed that does that? I think it was quite handy.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

We can evaluate installing additional plugins if we consider them required for the way we want to use the forums.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

In fact the current settings for topic order over #help-and-support is exactly like that

[Tordanik (Tobias Knerr)]

Does that setting also apply to the posts (which is what were’s looking for here) or only the topic list?

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

As far as I understand only to the topic listing. For the posts inside a topic I remember seeing a plugin but not sure if it’s working as we want to.

For long topics, there is a default feature to summarize a topic and you’ll get most liked replies, but I don’t know if that’s enough for us.

[Tordanik (Tobias Knerr)]

@nukeador

For long topics, there is a default feature to summarize a topic and you’ll get most liked replies, but I don’t know if that’s enough for us.

Not really. The point of a help/Q&A platform is that someone looking for the answer should learn all they need to know from a single post that has risen to the top of the list of answers (immediately below the question) by receiving the most votes.

Do you know StackOverflow? It’s by far the most popular example of the idea.

The plugin linked by @hfs looks promising, but I’m not sure if it’s possible to enable this sort order in a particular category by default.

[habi (David Haberthür)]

An answer can be marked as solved, and is then showed as link in the question.

At least this is the way it can work on https://forum.image.sc/, with an example here: Script ilastik .h5 image import in FIJI - Usage & Issues - Image.sc Forum

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Forums governance team meeting - 2022-04-21

Sorry I forgot to add an additional decision (added now): The Question and Answer plugin will be installed and tested.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

We have just found that the Questions-answers plugin was deprecated in favor of a new official one. Waiting until this new one is ready for deployment (still in development).

[osmidal]

@nukeador

Waiting until this new one is ready for deployment (still in development).

A follow up on this:
Here is stated:

@nukeador

The plugin we were waiting for being ready for deployment has recently (in the past weeks) changed its label to ready for deployment, so any updates on the timeline would require @Firefishy having the time to evaluate it first.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Plugin is now installed and can be tested in new topics on Help and support and Tagging help & support

Example for testing:

Testing topic voting

The new topic voting plugin has been enabled for new topics in this category. Creating a new topic to test it and make everyone familiar with it. Cheers.

[InsertUser]

The old help site allows other users to convert an answer to a comment and vice versa if it has been submitted via the wrong method. Is this possible with this new plugin?

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Not that I’m aware of, maybe a good feature request for upstream (If it’s not yet planned)

Discourse Post Voting

[InsertUser]

OK, I thought it might be a mod thing I don’t have access to here.

[IanH]

Is thereca why to copy existing Qustion/Answer thread to the help section. There is jo reason a person should have to post a question if has already been answered.

[SomeoneElse (Andy Townsend)]

@IanH

Is there a why to copy existing Qustion/Answer thread to the help section

I’d imagine that the “help” site is turned off (at least to new submissions) if this site can replace it functionally. One of the reasons for looking at Discourse was that it was being actively developed whereas OSQA (the software behind the help site) was not.