Recently I stumbled upon the QPixel software on GitHub. It's a Q&A-based community knowledge-sharing software, that is an open source web application written in Ruby on Rails and that allows users to register, ask questions, answer other questions, edit and comment on content written by others and vote on the content. Content is then shown ordered by score with the highest voted answers and questions on top.
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| Example view of questions in QPixel |
It's a time proven concept of efficiently creating a knowledge base that will eventually consist of high quality, relevant information. This information is very useful to visitors of these Q&A sites.
One of the pioneers in this area was Stack Overflow. The combination of bringing askers and experts together and at the same time measure the quality of the content by voting proved to be very fruitful. Millions of visitors have profited from the knowledge stored on the servers of Stack Overflow over the years. The software that powered the platform had a tremendous impact on the success of Stack Overflow as it allowed the collaboration of users from the whole world in such a quality rated Q&A style.
One drawback was that the software powering Stack Overflow is proprietary. Here QPixel comes to the rescue. While being developed actively for 1-2 years now, I'm really impressed by the quality of it. On the outside it looks and feels like a proper Q&A platform with most of the features that a successful Q&A platform needs. Being written in Ruby on Rails it relies on an open source framework that is specialized on efficiently creating web applications. A handful of people only realized a software in the last two years that I would describe as usable. It should be a serious consideration to try QPixel as a free, open source alternative for Q&A at your location.
Indeed there is an instance of QPixel running at Codidact with a few example sites show-casing the features of the software. It seems to run relatively smooth.
I have no idea how convenient it is to setup QPixel but what I really like about it are some features like categories (sub-divisions of single site community) or different post types (Q&A, articles, wiki pages) that can be configured quite freely.
The only other serious open source Q&A software alternative (in my eyes) is Question2Answer and while QPixel feels like an open source replacement for the Stack Overflow platform software, Question2Answer feels more like an open source Quora replacement to me.
