What you need
- Confluence Cloud.
- Q&A Knowledge Base installed on your site. Installing an app needs a Confluence site administrator.
- For the settings: Confluence administrator rights.
Questions and answers are real Confluence content, stored by Confluence in your site. That is why spaces, permissions and search behave the way your team expects. The first time an app is used, Atlassian shows a consent screen. Approve it once.
After a fresh installation, Confluence can take a few minutes (around five) to recognise the new content types. If the lists are empty or show an error right after installing, wait and reload.
Where to find it
- Apps, Q&A opens the site-wide Q&A. It has four tabs: Questions, Unanswered, My Q&A and Inbox.
- Q&A in the sidebar of a space shows the same view limited to that space.
- Settings, Manage apps, Q&A opens the administration, for administrators only.
- The macro Q&A question list embeds a filtered list on any page.
Ask a question
Choose Ask a question and fill in the form.
- Space: the space decides who can see the question.
- Title: be specific, as if you were asking a colleague. At least 5 and at most 200 characters. While you type the title, the form suggests earlier questions that look similar ("Already asked?").
- Details: what you tried, error messages, links. The editor supports headings, lists, code blocks, quotes, dividers, links, bold, italics, underline, inline code and strikethrough. Use the toolbar, or type
/for code blocks and lists. - Tags: separated by commas, up to five. Administrators can require at least one.
- Ask specific people (optional) mentions them in the question. Under an answer or a comment, Mention people (optional) does the same.
- Watch this question adds it to your inbox updates.
Choose Post question. Images and attachments are not supported in posts yet.
Answer, comment, vote and accept
- Answer with Post answer. An answer has the same editor as a question.
- Comment on a question or an answer. Comments are Confluence's own footer comments. Anyone who may ask or answer may comment.
- Vote up and, if administrators allow it, down. You have one vote per post, you can take it back, and you cannot vote on your own post.
- Accept an answer: the person who asked, or a moderator, marks one answer as accepted. Only one answer can be accepted at a time, and moving the mark takes one click. The accepted answer is shown first.
Statuses
Every question has one status: unanswered, answered, solved (it has an accepted answer), closed or duplicate. Unanswered questions have their own tab. A closed question takes no new answers.
Find questions
The Questions tab has a search box, filters for tag and status, and three sorting choices: newest, most recently active and most votes.
Search reads titles, the text of questions and the text of answers. A question is found even if the words you typed appear only in one of its answers, and the result says so. My Q&A collects the questions you asked, the questions you answered and the ones you are watching.
Watching and the inbox
Q&A does not send email. Instead, Inbox collects news about the questions you watch: a new answer, a comment, an accepted answer, a closed question, a duplicate, a question that was reopened, or a mention. Unread entries are marked, and entries are kept for 90 days. The person who asks a question watches it automatically, unless an administrator has turned that off.
@mentions in answers and comments are written as real Confluence mentions. Whether Confluence emails a mention for content created by an app is up to Confluence.
Moderation
Moderators are the groups an administrator chooses, plus administrators. They can:
- edit and delete anyone's post
- close a question with a note
- mark a question as a duplicate of another question
- reopen a question
- accept answers for others
A question that already has answers can be deleted only by a moderator.
Embed a list with the macro
Insert the macro Q&A question list on any page. In its settings you can choose:
| Setting | Choices |
|---|---|
| Title (optional) | A heading above the list |
| Space | The space of this page, all spaces, or one space |
| Tag (optional) | Only questions with this tag |
| Status | Any status, Unanswered, Answered, Solved, Closed or Duplicate |
| Order | Newest, Most votes or Recent activity |
| How many | 3, 5, 10 or 20 questions |
Administration
Open Settings, Manage apps, Q&A. The tabs are:
Who can do what
Three rules decide who may do what.
- Ask questions: who may post new questions.
- Answer and comment: who may post answers. Anyone who may ask or answer can also comment.
- Moderate: who may edit and delete any post, close questions, mark duplicates and accept answers for others.
Ask and Answer are either everyone who can see the space, or members of the groups you list. Administrators can always do everything. The rules apply to the whole site and can be overridden per space (see Spaces).
Spaces
- Where Q&A is on: All spaces or Only these spaces.
- Home space: the space suggested when somebody asks from the site-wide page.
- Space settings: for any space, Add space settings to give it its own rules. Own rule for asking and Own rule for answering replace the site-wide rule for that space. Extra moderators adds groups to the site-wide moderators.
Options
- Allow down-votes
- Watch automatically: asking, answering or commenting watches the question.
- Require a tag
- Tags per question: from 1 to 5.
- Search: Automatic uses Confluence's search and switches to the app's own search if Confluence does not return the app's content.
Search
Run the search check tests whether Confluence's search covers the Q&A content and shows whether the app is using Confluence search or its own search. The own search is slower, and it looks at the newest 1,000 questions only, so on a site with more questions than that it can miss older ones.
Import and export
See the next two sections.
About
Shows the license status, how notifications work and where the data is.
Import questions from a CSV file
Open Import and export. Choose a file or paste the text, choose the space to use for rows that have none, and select Check the file. The preview shows the problems with their line numbers (the first 30, and the total). Rows with problems are skipped, and the rest is imported when you start the import. Keep the page open while the import runs.
- A file can have up to 5,000 rows and be 3 MB.
- The posts are created by the administrator who runs the import. The original author, date and votes are kept and shown.
- Imported votes are totals without voters. People can still vote after the import.
CSV columns ("Q&A CSV v1")
One row per question or answer. Commas, semicolons or tabs are accepted (decided by the header row), quotes can be used to include line breaks, and the file can be UTF-8 with or without a byte order mark. Column names are matched without regard to capitals and several aliases work (for example question_id is the same as parent, and votes the same as score).
| Column | Applies to | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
type | both | question or answer (q and a also work). Required |
id | both | Your own id in the file: letters, digits and . _ : -, up to 80 characters. If missing, the row number is used. Answers and duplicates refer to the ids of questions |
question_id | answers | The id of the question the answer belongs to. Required for answers |
space | questions | The space key, for example ENG. If missing, the space chosen in the import dialog is used |
title | questions | At least 3 characters |
body | both | The text. The column is required |
body_format | both | text (the default, a blank line starts a new paragraph) or storage, html or xhtml for Confluence storage format |
tags | questions | Separated by commas, semicolons or line breaks; changed to lower case with hyphens; up to 5 |
author | both | A display name as text, with no link to an account |
author_account_id | both | An Atlassian account id on the target site, if you can match one; the post then belongs to that person in the app |
created | both | An ISO date such as 2019-03-02 or 2019-03-02T10:00:00Z, or epoch seconds or milliseconds. Orders the lists |
votes | both | A whole number, possibly negative |
accepted | answers | true, yes, y, 1, x or accepted. One per question; the first is kept and a warning is shown for more |
status | questions | open (also unanswered, answered, solved), closed or duplicate |
duplicate_of | questions | The id of another question in the same file. If it does not exist, the question is imported as closed with a warning |
Unknown columns are ignored with a warning. Errors such as a missing title, an unknown type, an answer without a question, a space that does not exist or a duplicate id are listed by row number in the preview.
Export to a CSV file
Under Import and export, Export to a CSV file writes the questions and answers you can see, with the same columns the import reads. An export can therefore be imported on another site.
- Choose which questions: all spaces you can see, or one space.
- Choose the text format: Formatted text (can be imported again) or Plain text (easier to read in a spreadsheet).
- One export holds up to 2,000 questions. Export one space at a time for more, or if a very large export stops.
- Comments are not part of the file.
- Cells that start with
=,+,-,@or a tab get a protective character, so a spreadsheet does not run them as formulas. The import removes that character again. - The temporary export data is kept for 15 minutes, can be read only by the administrator who created the export, and is then deleted.
Moving from Questions for Confluence
Atlassian's Cloud version of Questions for Confluence has no export tool, and there is no importer for it. Q&A Knowledge Base reads a simple CSV file and shows you what it can import, by line, before anything is created. If you have the data from Server or Data Center, you can map it to the columns above. The table below is a map of concepts, not a ready-made converter.
| Questions for Confluence | CSV column | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Question: id, title, body | id, title, body | Add body_format with the value storage if the text is in storage format |
| Answer: id, question, body | type as answer, id, question_id, body | |
| Topics | tags | Separated by commas |
| Space | space | If a space is missing on the Cloud site, create it first or choose one in the import dialog |
| Author | author | Server and Data Center usernames are not Cloud account ids, so only the name is kept, as text |
| Created | created | The Cloud Migration Assistant resets dates; take them from the database or the REST response |
| Votes | votes | The sum of up and down votes |
| Accepted answer | accepted as true on the answer row | |
| Bounties | Not supported | |
| Comments, attachments, images | Not supported in CSV v1 |
If you need help converting data, write to support.
Rovo (optional)
If your site uses Atlassian Rovo, Q&A Knowledge Base offers an action, Find answers in Q&A, and an agent, Q&A Answers. They search as the person who is talking to the agent and return the three best matches, with the accepted or most voted answer and a link. People who do not use Rovo are not affected.
Limits
- The app sends no email. Watching works in the inbox, and @mentions are Confluence mentions.
- Confluence's own search box may not list Q&A content. This is a known Atlassian issue (CONFCLOUD-84122). The app's own search and the search check cover it.
- Guests and anonymous users see nothing.
- Posts cannot contain images or attachments yet. Links, code, lists and quotes work.
- Comments are not part of the CSV export, and one export holds up to 2,000 questions.
- Imported posts are created by the person who runs the import. The original author and date are shown from the file.
- Confluence Cloud only. Data Center is not supported.
Permissions and data
Q&A Knowledge Base acts as you for everything you do, with one exception for moderators (see Security). Questions, answers and comments are stored by Confluence, and the rest in Forge storage on your site. See Security and the Privacy Policy.
Need help?
See the support page for how to reach us, what to include and answers to common questions.