OSQA Administrator's Guide

Table of Contents

OSQA Administration Guide

We recommend that all OSQA administrators read this guide in its entirety. Not only will this guide tell you how to setup and customize OSQA, but it will also show you how to make OSQA work for you. Features such as reputation and bootstrap mode will help you grow your site into the giant web property that you know it can become. However, before OSQA can start doing its job, you need to tell OSQA what it needs to do.

The administration section is located at www.yourdomainname.com/admin. From here you will be able to view and edit all your major OSQA settings. To the left of the screen you will see your website's statistics. This includes stats for questions, answers and users along with the most recent activity.

On the right hand side of the screen is the Administration menu. Almost all administrative duties can be preformed from here. The main purpose of this guide is to explain these links and the settings contained within them.

Here are some links with information that this guide doesn't cover that you may find useful.

• Adding Facebook Authentication to OSQA
• Adding Twitter Authentication to OSQA

Bootstrap Mode

"Bootstrap mode" basically means that all the minimum requirements are relaxed in order to help encourage and incubate growth at newly established OSQA sites. When the bootstrap mode is enabled, your site will allow everyone who registers to vote, comment, answer, etc. It is recommend that you place your new OSQA site in bootstrap mode until it builds up momentum and really gets going. Once the site does become popular, you may want to set reputation requirements that users must fulfill before they can perform certain actions, such as voting.

To enable bootstrapping go to the administration page and click the button labeled "go bootstrap."

Administration Menu

Basic Settings

The "Basic Settings" section in the administration page is where you can manipulate the general information about your OSQA site.

• Application Logo: The logo you wish to use throughout this website
• Favicon:
  • Short for "favorites icon."
  • Will be associated with your particular website.
  • Typically displayed in the address bar of a browser viewing the site.
• Application Title: What will show in the browser's title bar for your site.
• Application Short Name: The short name for your application that will be displayed in many places throughout your site.
• Application Keywords:
  • The meta keywords that will be available through the HTML meta tags.
  • This is one of the ways that search engines like Google can find your site.
  • Go here for more information on how to help Google find you.
• Application Description: The description of your application.
• Application Intro: The introductory page that is visible in the sidebar for anonymous users.
• Copyright Notice: The copyright notice visible at the footer of your page.

Email Settings

Email is a key factor of any website. The "Email Settings" section is where you inform OSQA about your email configuration.

• Email Server: The outgoing SMTP server through which your application will be sending emails. Eg. mail.yourdomainname.com, or smtp.yourdomainname.com
• Email Port: The port on which your SMTP server is listening to. Usually this is 25, but can be something else.
• Email User: The user that OSQA will utilize as a way to send emails. Eg. admin@yourdomainname.com
• Email Password: The password for The email user.
• Use TLS: Specifies if your SMTP server uses TLS for authentication. Go here for more information on TLS.
• Site Email Address: The address that will show up on the 'from' field on emails sent by your website.
• Email Subject Prefix: Whatever is contained in this field will be appended to all out going OSQA mail.

External Keys

External keys are for using the services of various external providers such as Google. Certainly OSQA supports the use of Google, Twitter and Facebook. Follow the links bellow to get keys for these resources.

• Google:
  • https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
  • http://www.google.com/analytics/
• Facebook:
  • http://www.facebook.com/developers
• Twitter:
  • http://www.twitter.com/apps

After receiving your new keys add them into there receptive fields and click the save button.

Configuring Reputation

Loss and Gains

How much reputation a user will gain or lose based on his/her actions is dictated by the "Reputation Gains and Losses Config" section of the admin page. Every field is an action that is monitored by osqa. When a user preforms one of these actions OSQA will reference this page to decide how much to add or take away.

Minimum Reputation for Privileges

OSQA decides if a user will be allowed to preform certain action based on the reputation of the user in question. You can adjust the levels of the minimum reputation required for preforming actions from the "Minimum Reputation Config" section of the administration page. For instance, if I entered 15 into the "Minimum Reputation to Vote Up" field then that would mean that a user would have to have at lest a reputation of 15 to be aloud to vote up.

Voting Rules

The "Voting Rules" section is where limitation on voting can be set. It is often useful to not allow users to go on voting sprees. This can help keep the content on your site clean.

Badges

Badges are like mile markers for your users to track their progress and to compare it with other users on your site. The administration area's "Badge Config" section is where you can go to set the level's at which badges will be given.

File Upload Settings

This section where you tell OSQA how you want it to handle uploaded files. The installation process should have handle all of this for you. However, here is a list of the fields and what they represent.

• Uploaded Files Folder: The path to where uploaded files will be stored. This folder must exist.
• Uploaded Files Alias: The URL alias for uploaded files.
• Max File Size: The maximum allowed file size for uploads.

About Page

The about page is simply what will be shown to your users on the www.yoursite.com/about/ page. This section gives the user the ability to use a markdown language. To learn more about markdown and how to use it go here.

Robots

Your site's robots.txt file restricts what a search engine's "robots" have access to. Search engine robots are automated and thier purpose is to index the web so the search engine can direct people where to go. A robots.txt file prevents those robots from accessing certain pages. Here are some examples of how to implement your robots.txt file.