codidact
Make question guidance collapsible
Related: meta:293802
We have (customizable) guidance for questions and answers. When posting or editing a question, we show that guidance above the editor. Currently we do not show the answer guidance, reported in https://github.com/codidact/qpixel/issues/1617.
Experienced users ignore or scroll past the guidance that we do show, but newer users benefit from it. The question guidance is at the top of the page so you can scroll past it, but if the guidance is long and the viewport is short, that can still be a hassle. As discussed in the linked issue, we don't want to show answer guidance above the editor on every single page, which would be noisy in the vast majority of cases where you are not starting to write an answer.
Proposal:
- Allow all guidance to be toggled on/off.
- For answers, don't show it by default but make the toggle obvious (not sure of the best UI pattern here).
- For questions, don't show by default (with obvious toggle) IFF the user has Participate Everywhere (by which point we assume you've done this a few times).
I think https://github.com/codidact/qpixel/issues/1617 is the more important issue here (answer guidance is invisible today), but whatever we do for toggling, we'll want to do it in both places. I'm leaving these as two separate issues in case we stall on the decision about when to show question guidance, but it seems possible that we'll do it all together.
Will linking the default visibility of the question guidance to the Participate Everywhere ability be a problem for communities (including other instances) where Participate Everywhere is given immediately?
Are there other possibilities we should consider?
For example:
- Have a user preference that defaults to "expanded" but can be changed to "collapsed".
- Make the state persistent to the next question, so if I collapse the question guidance today then a new question I start tomorrow will also have the question guidance collapsed.
Might also be worth discussing whether the state should be per community or per category (since different categories can have different guidance). Some categories (particularly specialist categories for things other than questions) might lead to users wanting to always see guidance for one and never for another.
This is mainly intended as a prompt for discussion - some of this may be better as separate issues rather than growing this one too much.
Those are good points -- we do want people to see the guidance at least once, and it can vary by category.
Maybe show it initially, and remember if the user toggles it off in the same way that we remember the "site guidance" block that shows on some communities? (Meta and Software Dev have this; view them while logged out to see what I'm referring to.) I thought we had problems remembering state, but then I remembered that site guidance, so we must have a way to do it (presumably a cookie).
Yes something like the site guidance would be good, provided it can also be toggled back on (I believe once dismissed the site guidance is gone forever). I might not want to see the question guidance for the first few basic questions I ask, but then I might have a more tricky question that I'm not sure whether to split into several, and wish I could see the question guidance again.
Remembered (like site guidance), but with a control so you can toggle it back on (or on at all, for answers where we won't show it by default).