We have been running a lot of demos across Europe recently, and one thing to come out of it all was the need to improve our “Questions and Answers” feature. So, we’ve done exactly that. This has been a key focus for us recently, and will continue to be for the next couple of weeks, so please watch out for another announcement soon.

Here are the updates to the platform so far, throughout the month of August:

• Added new start/end date feature to “Login & Registration” settings. This will enable you to set timed user access for new or existing users, denying them access when outside the specified date range
• Removed ability to rename Q&A section to improve usability
• Q&A: Editors / Standard levels no longer able to reply to all questions by default (Administrators and custom user levels with this permission enabled still can)
• Q&A: New permission added to questions, “Can Reply” which sits in between “View” and “Edit”. This will enable you to specify certain users (other than administrators) to be able to reply to questions by default
• Q&A: New table layout, bringing the section into alignment with other areas on the site.
• Q&A: add ability to add custom fields to the Q&A listing as new columns, and optionally restrict certain fields to specific users. This includes number of replies and question author as optional columns
• Q&A: new setting to optionally hide authors of question replies by default (these are shown by default and can be over-ridden by a permission set at user level – enabled by default for Administrators)
• New Q&A notifications are automatically enabled for new users (they will only receive notifications for questions they have permission to view)
• Changed default Q&A permission so when a new question is asked, this can only be viewed by administrators and the author of the question only (this can be changed in Q&A settings)
• Various minor bug fixes, usability and performance improvements

If you have any questions about any of these improvements, please do get in touch.