Clicking on a pending question causes the question to be immediately set to 'published' status, regardless of whether the person clicking the question has the capacity to answer the question.

I've verified that setting the content type workflow value for 'published' to false does not change the behavior.

From my perspective, this is a highly undesirable state. It means that anyone clicking through on a question MUST be prepared to answer it at that time, or manually set the status to 'not published.'

I realize people using this module have adjusted their workflows to deal with the fact that it always published any pending FAQ that any Expert ever looks at. Therefore, I suggest that the module be modified to honor the content type default for the FAQ content type, rather than automatically setting the type to 'published'.

CommentFileSizeAuthor
#6 notpublished.png16.22 KBstenjo

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escoles’s picture

escoles commented

My tentative workaround for this (haven't fully verified yet that this will work):

  • FAQ content type set to 'not published'.
  • Create View with block display showing unpublished FAQ nodes, with an Edit link. Use this in place of the pending questions block.

Essentially routing around the module's normal workflow -- or, from my perspective, restoring the normal workflow for Drupal node management (clicking on a link doesn't perform an action, but rather allows you to open a form which will perform an action).

Why this is necessary:

In order for an expert to answer a question, they have to be able to read it. Under the current workflow, the act of an expert simply looking at the question makes it visible to everyone. This is a problem in one way that are immediately important to me: It has the potential to expose spam or other undesirable content to the public, however briefly, because the page is always published before it is edited.

Obviously with careful training the first issue can be mitigated by having experts exercise great discipline in answering quickly, or in immediately un-publishing the nodes where they can't. I don't find that to be a realistic mitigation strategy for most of the cases where I'd want to use this module. (e.g., I'm trying to integrate it on the site for a small contract manufacturer right now. The experts would be materials and manufacturing engineers with demanding quick-turnaround jobs -- we'll be lucky to get them to even look at this thing, much less be able to guarantee that they'll follow a precise multi-step procedure where failure is the default mode.)

stenjo’s picture

stenjo commented

I have actually noticed the same thing myself, and found it a little annoying. The list http://www.example.com/faq_ask/unanswered do not, however, have that behaviour - only the block as I have seen. If you are able to use the page rather than the block, your problem should be solved.

This IS by design, and there might be people using this feature for all I know. This might be controlled by a setting though...

escoles’s picture

escoles commented

FWIW, I've abandoned this module as solution. It seemed to me that the cost in time to configure around the features I couldn't use was at least equal to the time required to do this using the Workflows module. Feel free to close -- I'm not sure what status to choose.

stenjo’s picture

stenjo commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

Currently the unanswered block causes nodes to be published when title of unanswered question is clicked. The same goes for the faq_ask/unanswered page as this is the intended behaviour.
If the expert still do not feel she/he is prepared to answer the question, they should save the question again with published status set to false.
One option would be to check the workflow default 'published' and then determine the published state of the question by that. This would probably require a warning message that the question is still not published when answered and that the question must explicitly be published.
I suggest this issue is closed and will ask anyone who feel this is a drawback for the module to re-open or to file a new issue.

stenjo’s picture

stenjo commented
Status: Closed (works as designed) » Active

On second thoughts I think it might be worth a try. Would it be good to have something like this:
If the faq node type is set to default unpublished when created then the question wil not automatically be published when link is clicked either in the list block of unanswered questions or on the page.
The expert will edit and save as usual, but in this case the following warning will appear:
This question is by default NOT published. To publish the answered question when you are ready, click this link
- when the unpublished node is saved. As long as the question is not published, then this warning will appear every time the expert saves the question.
The clickable link will in an instant publish the node and redirect the user to the published view of the node.
Does this seem to be a good solution?

stenjo’s picture

stenjo commented
Assigned: Unassigned » stenjo
Status: Active » Fixed
StatusFileSize
new notpublished.png16.22 KB

An implementation of this is now available in 6.x-2.x-dev.
When automatic published is off at /admin/content/types/faq:
Content type default not published :

  1. The expert is shown a notice that the question with answer is not yet published when saving an unpublished node even if the answer field is filled in.
  2. A clickable link will publish the question with the answer when klicked
  3. The question remains in the list of unsanswered questions while it is not published, but removed from the list when published.
  4. When the question is published it is shown as published to the expert.

Hope this satisifies your needs.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.