Developer Community March 15th Update - Questions vs. Articles

This is the first of several postings on the release coming March 15th

Questions vs. Articles

We now have the ability to distinguish, at posting time, between a "Question" and an "Article". These two types of postings will exhibit different behaviors that we think will optimize the experience of the user.

Questions

When the post type is Question, the detail page will feature the ability to comment on the original posting as well as provide an Answer. To avoid UI complexity, you cannot comment on a Comment, but you can comment on an Answer. A given question may have zero or more Answers. Comments and Answers can all be rated.

Here is an example of a question with a set of cooresponding Comments and Answers:

Articles

When the post type is Article, the detail page will feature the ability to comment on the posting and the comments are threaded.

Here is an example of an Article posting:

Post listings (Home Page, View by Tag, View by Group)

Pages that display a listing of posts now have the following features:

1. If the posting is a Question there is a question mark icon prefixing the title
2. If the posting is a Question the number of answers are displayed along with the number of comments. For Articles, only the number of comments are displayed.
3. For both posting types the rating is displayed
4. Answers and Comments links are hyperlinked to those sections of the post detail
5. Both the title and the body of the content is hyperlinked to the post detail
6. The post's age is displayed
7. The last comment (and answer for Questions) age is displayed
8. The ability to subscribe and unsubscribe to the posting thread. This is a new feature that will be detailed in another posting.

This is an example from the post listing that will be displayed on the home page: