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4. Create and edit a Q&A board

 Create and edit a Q&A board
===============================

Updated 4 hours ago · 6 min read

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#### What is a Q&A board?

A Q&A board is a participation tool that allows community members to ask specific questions and receive official answers. Unlike forums or discussion boards, Q&A boards are focused on providing clear, authoritative responses rather than facilitating conversations between users.

Add a Q&A board
-------------------

To add a Q&A board to your project:

1. In the left-hand menu, click **Projects**.
2. Click on a project to open it.
3. In the project sub-menu, under **Participation**, click **Q&A boards**. This shows all the Q&A boards created for this project.
4. Click the round **+** button at the top right of the screen.
5. Give the Q&A board a **Title**. This will be publicly visible on your project page.
6. Provide a brief **Summary** to expand on the title.
7. Add **Introduction text** to provide users with more context about the Q&A board.
8. The Q&A board includes two default input fields:

    - **Question**: A short text field limited to 150 characters
    - **Elaborate**: A longer text field limited to 500 characters
9. You can also add additional input fields if you need to gather more information.
10. Set an **End date** to determine when this Q&A board will stop accepting new questions.
11. In the settings panel on the right of the screen, configure the following options:

    - **Who can submit**: Choose whether anyone or only authenticated users can submit questions.
    - **Question Voting**: Configure how users can vote on questions with options to allow up voting only, allow up and down voting, or disable voting.
    - **Who can vote on a question**: choose which users have permission to vote.
    - **Question moderation**: Determine how new questions are moderated by selecting Manual moderation, Automatic moderation, or Publish immediately.
    - **Default sort order:** Choose the order questions appear in for the public: **Trending** (most viewed), **Popularity** (most upvoted), **Latest** or **Oldest**. New Q&A boards use Latest.
12. When you're finished, click **Publish**.

![The + icon on a project's Q&A boards list, used to create a new board.](https://engage.knowledge.civ.io/storage/qhMyXqospVS41pa74ElYI51v1cu6zLjQY9qojGJh.png)

![The Q&A board's settings, showing Who can submit, Question Voting, Who can vote on a question and Question moderation.](https://engage.knowledge.civ.io/storage/KqWIA7IUmJv9bckdYkchJwYd4EbmRZlkvLj1znAB.png)

View and respond to questions
-----------------------------

Once your Q&A board is published, community members can submit questions. As an administrator, you can view and respond to these questions:

1. Navigate to your project and select the Q&A board you want to manage.
2. Open the **Submissions** tab. It lists every question submitted to the board.
3. The list displays each question with the following columns:

    - **View**: opens the question's moderation screen
    - **ID**: the unique identifier for the question
    - **Responded**: shows Yes or No to indicate if a response has been provided
    - **Status**: the question's moderation status, for example REQUIRES APPROVAL or PUBLISHED
    - **Question**: the text of the submitted question
    - **Elaborate**: the additional details provided by the submitter

    Scroll the table sideways to reach the **Referer domain** and **Referer path** columns.
4. The **Submissions** tab also carries a **Questions** sub-tab. That is a per-question view: choose one question from **Select a question** and it lists the answers to that question on their own, with sentiment and tags where they have been assigned.
5. Click **View** on any question to open the moderation screen.
6. From the moderation screen you can:

    - Review the question details
    - Publish or reject the question, using the buttons on the **Moderate question** bar at the top of the page. Which buttons appear depends on the question's current status: a question with the status **Requires approval** or **Rejected** offers **Reject** and **Publish**, and a published question offers **Reject** and **Unpublish**.
7. Once the question is published, a **Submission response** field appears beneath it. Write your official response, then click **Publish response** to make it visible to the public. To take a published response back down, click **Unpublish response**.

![The Submissions tab of a Q&A board named Event FAQ: two submitted questions sit under the ID, Responded, Status, Question and Elaborate columns, and the table closes with Showing 1 to 2 of 2 results. A column of unlabelled navigation icons and the project menu, with Q&A boards selected, run down the left.](https://engage.knowledge.civ.io/storage/GlEsIevkhSU5HV7vo8zLj9faCHGIiyjqjzZlNZnA.png)

![The moderation view for a published Q and A submission, with the Reject and Unpublish actions, the question and elaboration, and the submission response field.](https://engage.knowledge.civ.io/storage/cXZrUVJLXOetIVXfK88TqjkbgCiR1J5qgrsieMM9.png)

#### Important

When you publish your response to a question, the system will automatically send a notification to the person who submitted the question. Note that only the first publication of a response triggers a notification; subsequent edits to an already published response will not generate additional notifications.

Edit a Q&A board
--------------------

To edit an existing Q&A board:

1. In the left-hand menu, click **Projects**.
2. Click on a project to open it.
3. In the project sub-menu, under **Participation**, click **Q&A boards**. This shows all the Q&A boards created for this project.
4. Scroll to the relevant Q&A board, and click on the **ellipsis** on the right-hand side for more menu options.
5. Click **Edit**.
6. Alternatively, click on the Q&A board you want to edit, then click the **Edit** tab.
7. When you're finished making your changes, click **Publish**.

![A Q&A board's ellipsis menu, open with the Edit option visible.](https://engage.knowledge.civ.io/storage/bMiR9dqJvD3UF73d86aWZGVZ6TtQdFqY5ZizHtAY.png)

Q&A board reporting
-----------------------

The Q&A board includes built-in reporting capabilities to help you track engagement:

1. Navigate to your Q&A board and click the **Report** tab.
2. The reporting dashboard builds one widget for each input field on your Q&A board: **Question** and **Elaborate**, plus any extra fields you have added. Each widget charts the answers to that field.
3. The report opens on **Last 7 days**. If your board's questions are older than that, switch to **Last 30 days**, **Last 90 days** or **Custom range** until the window covers them. Outside the window each widget reads *No result with current filter*.
4. The download icon in the upper right of the report, tooltip **Export report**, saves a picture of the page: choose **Download PNG image** or **Download PDF document**. To export the question data itself, use **Export submissions** in the **More...** menu instead.

![The Report tab of a Q&A board with the date range set to a custom range of 01 Jan 26 - 01 Mar 26, showing the two widgets the report builds for the board's fields: Question, with one Negative and one Positive bar, and Elaborate, with one Positive bar.](https://engage.knowledge.civ.io/storage/sgNvbThGT4t4Iz6dGM8STnhqB04f2vqR2XESHbqx.png)

![A close-up of the upper right of a Q&A board's Report tab, showing the add, settings and download icons with the download icon highlighted. Its tooltip reads Export report.](https://engage.knowledge.civ.io/storage/Yi3VU4OmU1sswPbAViUq3qjp3gjXIKDxNRHNyW1P.png)

Additional options
------------------

The Q&A board offers several additional management options through the **More...** menu:

- **Export submissions**: Download all questions and responses in an Excel format
- **Clone**: Create a duplicate of the Q&A board
- **Revisions**: View the history of changes made to the Q&A board
- **Embed**: Get code to embed the Q&A board on an external website
- **Delete**: Permanently remove the Q&A board

![The Q&A board's more options menu, listing Export submissions, Clone, Revisions, Embed and Delete.](https://engage.knowledge.civ.io/storage/6nAL3VlF53GcrYORWn6rs0tcc9qITrzsRrWIEDNy.png)

Notifications 🔔
---------------

The Q&A board generates notifications to keep both administrators and community members informed:

- When a new question is submitted that requires moderation, reviewers and project managers receive a notification.
- When an administrator publishes a question, the person who submitted the question receives a notification.
- When an administrator responds to a question, the person who submitted the question receives a notification.

#### Best practices

**For effective Q&A management:**

- Respond to questions promptly to maintain community engagement
- Use clear, concise language in your responses
- Consider enabling question voting to help identify the most common or pressing questions
- Regularly export question data to identify trends and common concerns

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