Is Confluence Questions stopped being developed?

Question

The last version of Questions was released in January of 2016. And no any news since that time.

Is it dead?

There're so many shortcomings in the product and if it's not being developed any more we don't want to grow our knowledge base in it and better to migrate to something else.

Daniel Varela Santoalla · Answer

Hi @Wendell Keuneman

Is all this you said about the continuing development of Confluence Questions still standing at the end of 2018? If I look at the version history I cannot see anything else than bugfixes from the beginning of 2016

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211644/questions-for-confluence/version-history

So no new features at all for almost 3 years... Doesn't look good.

Daniel

ps: Anyone could recommend an alternative solution that would integrate well with JIRA/Confluence/Bitbucket?

TomC · Answer

@Wendell Keuneman I agree with many of  @Sergei Dorogin's suggestions, notably

* - "Allow some small customization of UI: I don't demand much, but give me a chance to put some text for users with notes/warnings/help links/etc." which I believe I sent you via email as well.

Either a small customization (such as a 'box' that is admin-editable) or the ability to 'pin' noted Q&As up top (which could have the added benefit of allowing user feedback for things they feel could be better stated or what is missing). For example, we tried "How do I ask a Question?" and "How do I answer a Question?" and thought we could pin it by having multiple people upvote the question, but found that due to the formula behind things, that only works for a small period of time.
* "I want to allow some users to moderate specific featured topics (edit/delete/mark accepted/etc). I don't need reputation based model.".  We could use that too, because we will have this open to thousands and can assign some folks to monitor certain areas because of their subject matter expertise, and don't want to wait months for them to acquire the points needed. That being said, I also do like the reputation points model that will encourage more users to participate. Just an override for named users is preferable.
* The two filter ideas - tags and Unaccepted are sound. The more functional this is for users (and admins), the easier chance that adoption will occur. With adoption struggles, the application may not embed itself into the organization as easily (or at all). But hey, CQ is so close!  Just a few more tweaks and it'll be there.
* One new idea: the ability to favorite a Q&A for the user's personal reference. We're a few versions behind so maybe this has been added. Users find some helpful information there they want to quickly reference without remembering details - i.e. make this a tool that allows them to refer back to a question more than once. And being able to search their favorites would be magnifique.

Thanks for listening. I don't know about Sergei, but I'll be at Summit this year and would be happy to talk more in person if you will be there as well. If there would be a few of us interested, what a great CQ focus group for direct user feedback and discussion!

Sergei Dorogin · Answer

I'd not say that we have some specific needs. Most of our desires are seemed to be shared by all other users of CQ (I'm reasoning this based on questions here and issues in Jira).

But out top demands:

* Please value user content! Currently it's very easy to lost all entered text in forms (question/answer/comment). Just left form open for some time than enter text and save. Some stupid error will arise (about expired session). Hey, it's 2016, what session? Where is my 2Kbyte of thoughts I produced. And you lost them. Terrible 
 Confluence has Drafts but CQ doesn't use Drafts.
* Statistics page is simple unusable. It requires some filtering (by date range) capabilities to be usable.
* Allow some small customization of UI: I don't demand much, but give me a chance to put some text for users with notes/warnings/help links/etc.
* For some reason you limited markup capabilities in CQ (in questions/answers). For example no multi-level lists. WHY? Many (all?) formatting macros don't work.
* I want to allow some users to moderate specific featured topics (edit/delete/mark accepted/etc). I don't need reputation based model.
* "suggest answer" - often users don't mark answers as accepted, so it'd be helpful to suggest an answer which become accepted after some period of time automatically (if person who asked the question won't mark it as "not a solution")
* questions page (/questions) filter "Unaccepted" - currently we have recent/unanswered/popular (btw recent should be default). We also need "Unaccepted" - questions with no accepted answer.
* questions page (/questions) filter by tags. I know that currently it's possible to click a topic tag to get into "/questions/topics/id/topic" page with all questions by that topic. But I have to find a question with such a topic first. I want a filter with all featured/normal topics to choose from (+multiple selection would be helpful).
* sorting in with "Recent" filter in Questions page should take into account date of last comment not just question date (or it should be another filter - "By last activity")

Hope it helps.

UPDATED: added "Recent == by last comment date"