Ability to close questions?

Question

I was reading a comparison between Q2A and OSQA here:

http://meta.draw3cards.com/questions/365/should-we-consider-question2answer-as-an-osqa-replacement

and here:

http://meta.osqa.net/questions/6654/has-anyone-compared-osqa-to-question2answer

and they gave a few reasons against choosing Q2A, one of which was not being able to close questions.  I couldn't quite understand the need to close questions at the time, but I see Stack Exchange closes questions, and gives a reason why it was closed and who closed it - that seems like a good idea, so, here is a question-closing plugin:

https://github.com/NoahY/q2a-close

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Features
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- allows closing questions, which removes ability to answer, comment or vote on them.
- admin and mods can close questions by default
- optionally allow closing own questions
- adds notice below closed questions with linked name of closer and reason
- adds text to closed question titles
- all text fully customizable

Screenshot:

You can also include links to other questions in the reason:

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

AMAZING! I was requesting this feature, but before the plugins system came out, but it was never included in the features list. It would be good if admins and moderators could still comment and answer in the questions. This is the normal behavior in BBoards, but I'm not sure if it is the common behaviour for Q&A applications. :S

Comments

Okay, added exception for mods, they can now edit/respond, vote, select as normal.  Only locked for ordinary users < QA_USER_LEVEL_MODERATOR

Answer 2

Very good idea :-)

Answer 3

Nice work... although I do feel this sort of thing should be integrated into the Q2A core. Does this hook into a lot of events?

I'll give it a try though and let you know how it goes.

Comments

Yes, I agree it would be better in the core - I've left it open to Gideon, he's welcome to take my work and put any and all of it in the core as he likes and I'll remove the plugin.

It doesn't hook into any events... just a layer that checks if a question is closed or not, adds buttons and processes a "close_question" or "reopen_question" post.

One thing I didn't mention is this implements a new database table "^postmeta", which is how Wordpress does this sort of thing, I think (anyway, I got the table from Wordpress).  It would be nice to have this sort of thing standardized so we were all using one table.  The table goes like this:

given the pair post_id n and meta_key x, there is an arbitrary meta_value y.

So, any plugin can set metadata for a post as it likes using this table.  In this case I'm inserting a fake array of the form "userid^reason", where userid is the user who closed the post.

Answer 4

hello @noahy its me again xDDDD sorry, nice pluggin love it, i have small problem, close question and close message show the next error

Notice: Undefined index: hidden in /var/www/qs/qa-include/qa-theme-base.php on line 1619 Notice: Undefined index: raw in /var/www/qs/qa-include/qa-app-format.php(1265) : eval()'d code on line 195

and

Notice: Undefined property: qa_html_theme_layer_7::$qa_state in /var/www/qs/qa-include/qa-app-format.php(1265) : eval()'d code on line 183

and

Notice: Undefined property: qa_html_theme_layer_7::$qa_state in /var/www/qs/qa-include/qa-app-format.php(1265) : eval()'d code on line 32

and

Notice: Undefined property: qa_html_theme_layer_7::$qa_state in /var/www/qs/qa-include/qa-app-format.php(1265) : eval()'d code on line 206 Notice: Undefined property: qa_html_theme_layer_7::$qa_state in /var/www/qs/qa-include/qa-app-format.php(1265) : eval()'d code on line 206

and

select the best answer not auto close the quetion

all errors are in the closed question
thanks noahy

Comments

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/php-stop-notice-variable-warnings-errorlogs/

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Selecting the best answer does close the question... just doesn't put a [closed] after the title. (admin and mods can always answer/comment, even on closed questions).