Ask me Anything option for CC

​@Jasper You can create a thread to start an AMA at any time. Are you looking for anything specific? I wanted to ask before making a determination on your idea.

I'm not Jasper, but same team so…. 😄

I think our main train of thought with this is more about layout. In an AMA you want it to be clear which answer goes with which question, and that users asking the questions can also find the answers they're interested in.

Of course, the person answering can quote the question and then answer. But if the question is large, you may not want to quote everything. But, with quotes not linking back to the original reply, you kinda have to.

But, with the development of threaded replies, this situation is mostly covered.

Tagging a user covers letting them know their question has been answered. 

That just leaves other users reading along. They have to dig through an entire topic to see if there are questions that interest them. For that I'm thinking a sort ot automated table of contents feeature in the topic start?

​@Jasper, anything to add?

​@Erik_ ​@Jasper  Thanks for filling in the gaps here, and yes, this tracks with how I think about it too.

Threaded replies cover the core problem of keeping a question and its answer connected. Where things break down is when a thread gets long enough that someone reading through has no real way to find the questions they care about without scrolling the whole thing.

The table of contents idea is interesting, but I think it only works with structured data behind it. If we're inferring "this is a question" from unstructured reply text, the results would be pretty unreliable. Something like that would warrant a dedicated question submission flow, where questions are an actual content type with a relationship to their answers. Without that, you're just generating a list of links to random replies.

We've been thinking about this and we have put work into our back-end architecture that would eventually let us easily craft new content types. An AMA-style layout with proper question/answer structure would fit naturally there. Right now, though, we're not planning to build AMA as a standalone feature. We'll look at this again as we move beyond the release of threaded replies.

Appreciate you laying this out clearly. It's helpful to understand what the actual use case is, I’m keeping this idea open!