SteemQA - A new Steem-powered Q&A app!
Repository
https://github.com/irelandscape/steemqa
Most development is currently taking place on the develop branch.
Introduction
This is a status update on the current development state of SteemQA, a generic Questions and Answers application for the Steem blockchain.
In a similar way to Quora, applications running on the SteemQA engine will allow communities of users to submit questions and provide answers to those questions for a wide variety of topics.
Being a Steem-based application, SteemQA differentiates itself from Quora and similar projects by allowing users to reward contributors through upvotes. In this manner SteemQA offers an innovative way to financially reward quality contributions without the need to raise revenue through obtrusive advertising.
Post Body
This is the first development status update for the SteemQA project.
SteemQA is an application engine which allows users to quickly and easily setup Q&A applications for the domain area of their choice.
For example, the founder of this project intends to use SteemQA to launch a new StemQA application dedicated to S.T.E.M topics (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
Contributors will be able to post questions and answers through the SteemQA user interface, or through other Steem applications such as Steemit, Busy or Steempeak.
Contributions posted through third party applications are automatically detected by a Steem streaming application on the back-end server and inserted into the main SteemQA database.
SteemQA applications will be available for desktop browsers as well as an Android and iOS app.
SteemQA development is making good progress and at this stage about 40% of features required to release the first beta release is completed.
The biggest recent design decisions was to make use of the Steem-UA rating metric system for users and contributions ranking.
The following technologies are used throughout the project.
Client side:
- Javascript
- Node JS
- Vue JS
- Quasar framework and third party external components such as steemconnect-v2 SDK
- dsteem
Server side:
- Python
- Django framework and various related plugins.
- Beem
- Steem-UA API
The following is a summary of the functionalities currently implemented.
Home page
The Home page presents the user with a top level menu, a login link, a carousel of highest ranked questions and a row of swiping cards summarizing the most recent questions on the system.
Each card currently shows the question image (or generic image if none is present in the post), title, creation date, estimated monetary reward, number of upvotes and an overview button (which doesn't do anything at the moment).
The author and the main topic of the question are also displayed.
More useful information is expected to be added in the coming weeks.
Steemconnect sign in
The user can log in through Steemconnect by clicking the Login link and approving the SteemQA application.
Favourite Topics
Once logged in, the user can access the "My Topics" page through the drawer menu and select a subset of the available topics.
Submitting new questions
Logged in users can click the "New Question" tab and submit a new question.
Questions are validated by making sure that the title ends with a question mark.
When viewed on another Steem app, the question and answer bodies will show a short message with a link to the SteemQA application.
Question page
Users can access the question page by clicking on the image or title on the corresponding card.
The question comes first followed by the associated answers sorted by post-ua rating.
Upvoting
Authenticated users can upvote questions and answers through the upvote button.
The button opens a dialog which allows setting the voting weight.
Setting the voting weight to 0 amounts to canceling a previous vote.
Editing a questions and answers.
Authenticated users can edit their questions and answers by clicking he "Edit" button in the question page.
Discord channel
SteemQA now has a Discord channel and everybody interested in the project is welcome to join our new community!
Invite: https://discord.gg/KtYAr7c
Looking for developers!
SteemQA is still in its infancy but is now in a state where we are looking for enthusiastic developers to join the team!
If you have past experience with any of the technologies listed at the beginning of this article, please join the Discord channel and leave a message in the chat room or DM @irelandscape.
Main remaining tasks for first Beta release
The following list is a summary of the tasks that remain before release of the 0.1 version.
- Update home page to only show questions related to the user favorite topics
- Home page to show latest and best rated questions as well as answers.
- Add support for adding / editing / viewing comments.
- Question overview button
- Hide widgets to non-logged in users that are only available to authenticated users.
- Allow infinite swiping of questions on the home page. Cards are automatically added/removed as the user swipes left or right.
- Regular polling of the backend API for new question updates and updating accordingly the home page.
- Past contributions pages. Allow users to browse his past question/answer/comment/replies contributions.
- Allow user to bookmark favorite questions
- Allow users to "delete" contributions.
- Allow moderators to flag contributions. Flagged contributions won't be shown anymore on the UI.
- Integrate Steem-UA ratings.
- Searching capability
- Show user current voting power in upvote dialog.
- About and Help and Guidelines pages
- Cleanup menus and drawers
- Basic Steem wallet to see and claiming pending rewards.
- Automatically append questions and answers with a short message containing a link to the SteemQA application. This message is not shown when viewed through the SteemQA application.
- Updates in server-side streamer script
- StemQA logo
- Production distribution preparation
- Discord chat room
To infinity and beyond!
I am extremely enthusiastic about the new possibilities that SteemQA will bring to the Steem community!
With your help, we can make this project a reality and bring huge credibility to the Steem platform.
Looking forward to your feedback and stay tune for more updates in the near future!
Resources
This is an exciting project. I'm always happy to see new and innovative uses of the Steem blockchain, and this certainly falls under that criteria.
I would have liked to have seen greater detail and explanation in the post. You barely mention Quora. I'm a Quora user, but not everyone is familiar with it. An explanation of what it is and how SteemQA will be both similar and different would have been valuable here.
The post itself was reasonably well written, but could have used more polish. This is the big reveal of your project. I would shine it up as much as possible. I'll cite some examples:
"The main design decision that was made recently has been to make use of the Steem-UA ratings for user and question/answer ranking." This is an overtly and needlessly complex sentence. I would change it to something along the lines of: "Our biggest recent design decision was to make use of the Steem-UA ratings for user and question/answer ranking".
"SteemQA development is in good progress" is an odd way to put it. Why "in" good progress, and not "making good progress"?
"The author and the main topic of the question is also displayed." There are two things being displayed. Author and topic. Therefore, it should be "are also displayed," not "is also displayed."
These quibbles aside, this is a good post, introducing an exciting project. I look forward to further updates.
Your contribution has been evaluated according to Utopian policies and guidelines, as well as a predefined set of questions pertaining to the category.
To view those questions and the relevant answers related to your post, click here.
Need help? Write a ticket on https://support.utopian.io/.
Chat with us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
Thank you for your review, @didic!
So far this week you've reviewed 4 contributions. Keep up the good work!
Hi @didic, thank you for taking the time to read the post and for such a worthwhile review.
I think your comments are well put and I will revise the text shortly to address its shortcomings.
Cheers!
OK, I have reviewed and updated some of the text.
I hope this brings clarity.
Thanks again!
Hello! Your post has been resteemed and upvoted by @ilovecoding because we love coding! Keep up good work! Consider upvoting this comment to support the @ilovecoding and increase your future rewards! ^_^ Steem On!
Reply !stop to disable the comment. Thanks!
@irelandscape this is a great project to bring to the Steem-ecosystem - I have not spent much time contributing to Quora but I do locate answers there very often. How do you intend to prevent 1) subtle marketing or promotional ‘questions’ and 2) blatantly obnoxious, or griefer-style questions and answers? Will there be a quality assurance step before being committed to the blockchain? Can flagged or invalid questions & answers be ‘hidden from view’? What type of alpha-beta testing will be done - and will you invite the community to participate?
Really great idea bringing this style service to Steem because it really will deliver better questions and valid, valuable answers in the long run!
Hi @irelandscape!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your post is eligible for our upvote, thanks to our collaboration with @utopian-io!
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 8 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 8 SBD worth and should receive 96 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigHey, @irelandscape!
Thanks for contributing on Utopian.
We’re already looking forward to your next contribution!
Get higher incentives and support Utopian.io!
Simply set @utopian.pay as a 5% (or higher) payout beneficiary on your contribution post (via SteemPlus or Steeditor).
Want to chat? Join us on Discord https://discord.gg/h52nFrV.
Vote for Utopian Witness!
How does this differentiate itself from musing.io
Before starting working on the SteemQA project I contacted the Musion.io team to see if they would be interested to get help with the development of their app.
They weren't interested. Musing-io was also not open source.
So I decided to start my own Q&A application project which hopefully will distinguish itself enough from musing so as to provide a clear choice for users.
Sounds awesome, I always will prefer open source over closed source
Same here. The fact that the project is OS is much more in the STEEM spirit.