Questions from readers answered in the comments
The thing we noticed back in 2013, when Q&A first went on this site, was that a page titled with the exact question someone types into Google ranks for that question. Readers write the title for you. Q&A is the small plugin that collects those questions and gives each one a page.
The 2.0.0 download is a rewrite for WordPress 7 and PHP 8. We looked at forking one of the big forum-style Q&A plugins and decided against it; what you get here is one PHP file and one stylesheet.
Asking
Put [qa_ask] on a page. Guests enter a name and email, then a title, details (with a small set of allowed HTML) and an optional topic. Under Q&A, Settings you choose whether anyone may ask or only logged-in users, and whether new questions wait as pending for your approval or go live at once. Users who can already publish posts skip moderation. Guest names and emails are stored as private post meta on the question and never displayed.
The form has a nonce, a honeypot, and a rate limit of five submissions per ten minutes per IP. No captcha service, no external call.
Answering
Answers are ordinary WordPress comments, with the comment form relabelled “Post an answer”. This is the decision the whole plugin rests on. Your existing anti-spam plugin, your notification emails and your moderation queue all keep working, because to WordPress an answer is a comment on a post of type question.
The person who asked, or anyone with edit_others_posts, sees a nonce-protected “Mark as accepted answer” link on each approved answer. The accepted answer is sorted to the top with a badge, and the question shows as Answered on its page, in the list, and in a column on the admin screen.
Listing
- Archive at
/questions/, single questions at/question/slug/ [qa_list number="20"]with topic and open or answered filters- A hierarchical Topics taxonomy
- Questions appear in site search and feeds like any post type, and the block editor works for editing them
What is not here
No voting on answers. The accepted mark is the only quality signal, and for most sites that is enough. No reputation points, no user profiles, no private messages. If you want a Stack Overflow clone, that is a different and much larger plugin. There is no frontend JavaScript at all.
One bug worth mentioning from the testing: the post-submit redirect used the referer, which WordPress drops when it matches the current URL, so the form now carries its own return URL, validated with wp_validate_redirect. In the test we sent a forged return URL pointing at another host and it was replaced with the home URL. Tested on WordPress 7.1.4 and PHP 8.3; needs WordPress 5.8 and PHP 7.4.
