Answers

Answers is the hub's question-and-answer forum. Members post a question, other members answer it, everyone votes answers up or down, and the person who asked picks the answer that helped. On the site it appears as Questions and Answers at /answers. This chapter covers the administrator's side; the Hub users book covers asking and answering.

Whether your hub needs it

Answers is for the question that has an answer. A member is stuck on something specific, someone who knows replies, and the reply is marked as the answer so the next person to hit the same wall finds it in one look. Enable it on a hub where members use tools or data they did not write and will get stuck on — a hub around a simulation code, an instrument, a shared dataset. On a hub that is really a project workspace, where every conversation happens inside a group, it will sit empty.

The typical case: a paper cites your hub, a hundred new members arrive in a fortnight, and the same three questions about running the tool land in your inbox one at a time. Answers puts them somewhere public where the second person to ask finds the first person's reply.

Against its siblings:

• Better than the Forum at questions, because one reply gets marked accepted and floats to the top; a forum thread ends wherever it ends, and the reader has to read it all. Worse than the forum at discussion: replies to an answer are comments, three levels deep at most, and there is nothing to organise questions by except tags.
• Better than the Knowledge base at questions nobody anticipated, because members write it and you do not. Worse at anything you want to stay correct: an accepted answer is one member's opinion on one day, and nothing ages it out. Hubs commonly run both, and promote a question that keeps recurring into a knowledge base article.
• It is the only one of the five that attaches to your catalogue. The resources-questions and publications-questions plugins put a Questions tab on each tool and publication page, so a question asked there is filed against the thing it is about.

What it is not: it is not a support queue. A question here is public, nobody owns it, and nothing chases it if no one replies. Anything with a member waiting on a person belongs in Support.

Open it in the administrator interface under Components > Answers. Two sub-menu links sit at the top left: Questions, the default list, and Answers, the responses posted to those questions.

Questions

The Questions screen lists every question with its ID, Subject, State, Created date, Author, and Answers count. Click a column heading to sort by it; click again to reverse the order. The author column links to that member's record in the Members component and notes below the name when the question was posted anonymously. The answers count links to the Answers list filtered to that question.

Above the list, type a term in the search box and press Go to match it against question subjects and bodies, or use Filter by: to show Open Questions, Closed Questions, or All Questions. Clear resets the search.

The toolbar offers:

• Options — the component's configuration; see Options below. Shown only to administrators.
• New — open a blank question form.
• Delete — permanently remove the checked questions after a confirmation, along with their answers, comments, tags, and votes. There is no trash to recover from.
• Help — the built-in help screen.

Click the state icon in a row to toggle a question between open and closed. Closing a question is the same act the asker performs on the site by accepting an answer, except that no answer is marked as chosen and, when banking is on, no points are distributed.

Creating or editing a question

Click a subject, or New, to open the question form.

Details

Field	Notes
Anonymous	Hides the author's name from other members on the site. Managers still see it here.
Notify of responses	Whether the asker is messaged when an answer or comment is posted. Questions asked on the site always have this set.
Subject	Required. The one-line question. Maximum 250 characters.
Question	Optional. The longer version, with details, written in the editor.
Tags	Required. A comma-separated list. Saving without at least one tag fails with an error and returns you to the form.

Parameters

Field	Notes
Creator	The numeric user ID of the member credited with the question. Defaults to your own ID on a new question.
Created	The timestamp, YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss, picked from the calendar control.
State	Open or Closed. Trashed and reported questions cannot be set from this list.

The panel beside the form shows the question's ID and, for a saved question, its creation date and the creator's name.

Press Save to save and stay, Save & Close to return to the list, or Cancel to discard changes.

Answers

The Answers sub-menu link lists the responses members have posted. With no question chosen it shows Responses to all questions; reached from a question's answer count it is filtered to that question, whose ID and subject head the table and link back to the question.

Columns are ID, Answer (the first 75 characters, stripped of markup), Accepted, Created, Author, and Helpful, which shows the up and down vote totals. Filter by: offers All Responses, Accepted Response, and Unaccepted Responses.

The toolbar offers New (only when the list is filtered to one question), Edit, Delete, and Help. Click the accepted icon in a row to accept or reject that answer. Accepting marks the answer as chosen, clears the mark from any other answer to the same question, and closes the question; a question can have only one accepted answer, so checking more than one row and accepting is refused.

Creating or editing an answer

Details

Field	Notes
Anonymous	Hides the responder's name from other members on the site.
Question	The subject of the question being answered. Read-only.
Answer	Required. The response text, written in the editor.

Publishing

Field	Notes
Accept	Marks this response as the chosen answer.
Creator	The numeric user ID of the member credited with the answer.
Created	The timestamp, picked from the calendar control.

The panel beside the form shows the answer's ID, its creation date and creator, and its Helpful totals. When either total is above zero, a Reset Helpful button appears; it zeroes both counts and deletes the vote log for that answer, so members may vote on it again.

Closing out a question that has gone stale

The one job this component regularly asks of a manager: a question from the wave of new members has three replies, one of them is plainly right, and the asker never came back to accept it. Left alone it stays open and the right reply stays buried.

1. Go to Components > Answers. Set Filter by: to Open Questions and sort by Created to bring the oldest to the top.
2. Click the question's Answers count. The Answers list opens filtered to that question, with the vote totals in the Helpful column.
3. Read the replies and decide which one is the answer. The Helpful totals are a hint, not a verdict.
4. Click the Accepted icon on that row. The answer is marked as chosen, the mark is cleared from any other answer to the question, and the question closes.
5. Go back to Questions to confirm the state icon now reads closed.

Step 4 is reversible: click the icon again to un-accept, and toggle the question's state icon back to open. Nothing is mailed to anyone and no points move.

Comments

Members can reply to an answer, and reply to those replies, up to three levels deep. These comments live in the hub's shared item-comment table and have no administrator screen of their own. A comment reported as abusive becomes a support ticket and is hidden behind a notice on the site until the ticket is resolved; the same is true of a reported question or answer. See Support.

Options

The Options button opens four settings, listed with their values in the configuration reference:

Option	Effect
About points	The address of the page explaining the point system. Every "What are points?" and "Learn more" link on the site points here. Defaults to /kb/points.
Users notified on every activity	A comma-separated list of usernames messaged whenever a question or answer is posted.
Restrict accounts to create new posts	Disabled, or Enabled to block new accounts.
Minimum number of days to post	With the restriction enabled, how old an account must be before it may post.

All four ship empty or disabled, and three of the four are sensible left alone. About points matters only when banking is on, and its default of /kb/points assumes a knowledge base article at that address; if you have no knowledge base, or no article there, every "What are points?" link on the hub leads to a not-found page. Either write the article or point the option somewhere real. Users notified on every activity is empty by design — filling it in mails a named person about every question and every answer on the hub, which is fine on a quiet hub and unbearable on a busy one.

The two restriction settings are the ones to reach for after a spam wave. A new account cannot post until it is the given number of days old. Turn the restriction on, set Minimum number of days to post to something small like 3, and the drive-by accounts registered that morning are shut out while genuine new members are only delayed. Both changes take effect on the next page load and are undone by setting them back, so they are safe to try on a live hub.

The Permissions tab sets, per access group, who may administer the component, manage it (which gates the administrator screens entirely), create, delete, edit, edit their own, and change the state of questions and answers. On the site these same actions decide who sees the New Question button, who may save a question, and who may delete one: a member can delete their own question with core.delete, and anyone with core.manage can delete any of them.

Points and rewards

Everything about rewards only appears when banking is switched on in the Members component (Bank accounts). With it off, no reward field, point breakdown, or "Rewards" sort is rendered anywhere.

With banking on, each question carries a market value calculated from its answers, votes, and recommendations, and the asker may put a bonus reward on top from their own balance. The reward is held, not spent, until the question closes. When the asker accepts an answer, the accumulated value is split three ways: a third to the asker, a third to the writer of the accepted answer, and a third shared among other answers that drew at least three votes with a majority positive — or added to the accepted answer when no other answer qualifies. Deleting a question releases the hold and adjusts the asker's credit back.

Modules and plugins

Five site modules draw on this component: mod_answers, mod_recentquestions, mod_popularquestions, mod_myquestions, and mod_featuredquestion. Two answers plugins add the site's extra filters: answers-tools supplies "Questions related to my contributions" and notifies tool authors of questions tagged with their tools, and answers-members supplies "Questions tagged with my interests". Without them, those filters return nothing. The resources-questions and publications-questions plugins put a Questions tab on resource and publication pages, tags-answers includes questions in tag results, search-questions includes them in site search, and support-answers handles abuse reports.

API

The component exposes /api/answers/questions for listing, reading, creating, updating, and deleting questions; see the API reference. The site also publishes an RSS feed of the newest questions at /answers/latest.rss.