Ask an Expert Gets Question Follow-up
We’re happy to announce the release of one of the most requested features for the Ask an Expert application: the ability to follow-up with the person who submitted the question. This can be useful when we need to ask for more information before answering or if we need to provide clarifying statements once an answer is sent. This new feature is available starting today.
An Overview of Question Follow-up:
- The person who submitted the question can post replies to AaE responses. If you need more info about a question, just ask for it.
- Multiple responses from multiple experts can be sent to a single question.
- The ability to close a question if no response is needed (e.g. someone replies to simply say “thanks”)
- Follow-up is available for all questions in the system – existing and new.
There are very minor changes to the AaE application user interface in this new version. Most notably is the ability to re-open and reassign a question after an expert has provided an answer. The response section of the AaE question page will also look slightly different because it’s now designed to accommodate all expert and public users responses.
If the public user posts a reply after receiving a response, the question is reassigned to the last expert and an email is sent to that expert. The expert needs to respond if necessary or close the question if no response is needed.
We hope this feature makes it easier to work on questions and get the right answers out to the public. This completes Question Follow-up and Phase One which was released last month.
This is a great addition to Ask an Expert…almost approaches a Wikipedia format…now a feature that needs to be considered is a clearinghouse for questions that make no sense, are inappropriate or are spam or spam like…I hope to pursue this issue at the national conference next week. Thanks for your contributions.
Hi Greg,
Glad you like the new feature. As far as a way to clear out junk questions, that already exists. There’s a “Moderate this Question” link at the bottom of the right hand column on every AaE question page (you need to assign yourself the question to see that option). You can use that link to reject duplicate questions or questions that are inappropriate.