Discussion #3

Hi there! Time for this week’s update and discussion.

Progress

The comment feature has been finished. I went through a number of designs and tried to make it as user-friendly as possible. It should now be clear on the Question page where you go to discuss the question and where you go to answer it.

Question:

Question with discussion comment:

Clicking the Discuss or Add to Discussion button opens a small text input area that allows you to discuss the question. Each answer to the question will also have the discussion buttons/section too.

Clicking the Answer button will take you to the bottom of the page where you can submit an answer to the question.

Features in Progress

I have gotten a lot of input regarding tagging questions and doing things like allowing a user to add their version of Excel, etc.

The tagging feature itself is built, you can see two tags in the above images “excel” and “formulas-functions” but there is sill a little more to go.

Excel Version

I have thought about this a lot and I agree that a user should be able to enter their own version of Excel but I’m not sure how prominent that information should be or if it should be included in the search feature or not.

I’m thinking that it could go on a new line under the section that starts “posted by:…” for a question/answer.

Separately, I think a user should be able to mark a question as specific to an Excel version using Tags but I don’t think that needs to be a requirement or heavily enforced. That’s because many questions will apply to many versions of Excel, but most posters won’t know that and so they would probably cause more problems mislabeling questions.

Tag Creation

This is something that I’m not sure about.

Is it better to let users create their own tags for their question? Or, is it better to create a list of tags and let users select the tags from that list?

My thought is to create a list of tags that works in most general cases and then, maybe at some point in the future, add the ability for certain users, who are regular contributors, to be able to add tags to that list. This way the tags would be controlled but there would still be the ability to add new ones.

The benefit of having a semi-set list is that it will be easier to group questions by their tags instead of users misspelling words, etc. in their own self-created tags.

As always, let me know your thoughts! 🙂

Don