Adding Questions

The Question form appears when an administrator clicks on Add Questions in the navigation bar or when a contributor browses to the Contributor Add Question form. The form guides the user through all necessary steps to write and publish an FAQ. The following steps should be followed whenever adding questions.

Set the question assignments

Questions must be assigned to at least one of the displayed departments, topics, or subtopics. The assignment is made by checking the box next to the desired assignment. The tree control displays all possible departments, topics, and subtopics to which you can assign a question.

Contributors have access to the Question form to add questions into the system. These questions will be automatically marked as pending. When a contributor adds a number of questions in a row, the Question form retains the assignment of the previously added question.

Apply the assignments

The Apply button makes the changes in the assignments effective. Checking or unchecking boxes in the tree control has no effect unless the changes are applied through this step.The question order controls are generated after you apply the question assignments.

Compose the question and answer

The answer field may contain HTML tags and HTML special characters. The HTML is interpreted as in a web page: you can include links and apply formatting to the answer.

To display example HTML code in the answer, use special HTML characters. Usually special characters in HTML start with an ampersand (&), but in the FAQ system these placeholders start with a pipe (|). For example:

|lt; displays as < (corresponds to &lt;)
|gt; displays as > (corresponds to &gt;)

This substitution is necessary for the FAQ system to display HTML characters correctly after being stored in the database.

The Preview Answer link allows you to preview how the entered answer will display in the search results. You can easily check your links and HTML markup. The HTML preview displays the answer exacly as it will appear in the search results.

Modify the question order

Each topic and subtopic to which a question has been assigned has a separate question order control that displays all questions in a drop-down list in the current order. Select the order in which you want the edited question to appear.

Existing assignments show the current position of the question within the question order. New assignments have the default selection: Make this the first question. If you don't specify a particular order for a new assignment, the question is placed first in the list.

The question order includes pending and published questions.

Change status (optional) and submit

Step five offers different options for administrators or contributors. See the Privileges page for details on administrator and contributor privileges.

Administrators
Administrators can change the publishing status of the question by selecting the appropriate radio button. Changes are saved by submitting the question with the Submit button. Prior to submitting, no changes are applied. The Cancel button aborts the editing process and returns administrators to the Edit Questions screen.

Contributors
When submitting a new question, a blank Question form reappears with a new question number. If you want to stop adding questions, use the Logout button. The Logout button returns contributors to the Edit Questions screen.