Is Quora Open-Source?

Quora’s GitHub Projects

Even if Quora is not open source, there are other popular Q&A platforms in the open-source space.

Some publicly-listed open source Q&A platforms are outdated with little or no GitHub commit in the last ten years.

In this article, I’ll introduce you to the world of open source and show you five updated Quora open source alternatives that can help you kick-start your next project.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

What is Open Source?

Open source also known as open-source software, is code that is designed to be publicly accessible.

This means anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code for personal benefit.

Open source relies on collaborative efforts through peer review and community production.

On the other hand, software that’s not accessible to the general public is termed proprietary software.

Since open source is developed by communities, it’s more flexible, often cheaper and has more longevity than proprietary software.

Quora Open-Source Alternatives

The top 5 Quora open-source alternatives are:

1. Discourse
2. Vanilla
3. AskBot
4. Scoold
5. Question2Answers

1. DISCOURSE

Discourse is a 100% open source internet forum and mailing list management forum built for the next decade of the Internet.

UNIQUE STANDPOINT OF DISCOURSE

• Civilized Platform: the community builds a natural immune system to defend itself from trolls, bad actors, and spammers.
• Positive behaviors are also encouraged through likes and badges.
• Uncompromisingly open source: There is only one version of Discourse and it’s 100% open source. There’s no super secret special paid commercial version with better or more complete features.
• Simple, Modern and Fun: All the modern amenities you’d expect from a big social website like Twitter or Facebook are present in Discourse. Mention someone by @name.

DISCOURSE FEATURES

1. Dynamic Notification: Like Twitter, get notified whenever someone mentions your name with the @symbol and when someone replies to your post.
2. Simple, but with context: Discourse is a simple, flat forum where replies flow down the page in a line.
3. Community Moderation: Suppresses spam and harmful content and amicably resolves disputes.
4. Touch and Mobile Devices: Designed for high-resolution touch devices, with a built-in mobile layout.
5. Automatically expanded links: Links to popular websites automatically expand to provide additional context and information.
6. Trust System: As members become trusted regulars over time, they earn abilities to help maintain their community.
7. Single sign-on: Seamlessly integrate Discourse with your existing site’s login system with easy, robust single sign-on.
8. Spam blocking: Built-in Akismet spam protection and heuristics including new user sandboxing, user flag blocking, and standard nofollow.
9. Social Login: Easily add common social logins like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and GitHub.
10. Summarize topics: Summarizes button to condense long topics to just the most interesting and popular posts.
11. Gives Badges: Encourages positive community behaviors through the included set of badges, or add your own custom badges.
12. Access Standard Emojis: Choose from four different emoji sets, or define your own custom emoji.
13. Reply via email: from anywhere, on any device.
14. Two-factor authentication: Enhance your account security with the free Android or iOS authenticator apps.
15. Admin Dashboard: Your most relevant and essential community health metrics are only a click away.
16. Official Plugins: You can add chat integration, topic voting, Google Adsense, and more with Discourse officially supported plugins.
17. Comprehensive API: Replicate anything you see on screen via an API call.
18. 100% open source: Built by everyone for everyone.
19. One-click upgrades: Automatic notification of new versions in the dashboard, with a one-click web upgrade process.

BUILD TECHNOLOGIES

Discourse is a Javascript application built with Ember.js framework.

The server side of Discourse is Ruby on Rails backed by a Postgres database and Redis cache.

DEPLOYMENT

You can deploy our standard Discourse Docker container on any virtualized cloud server (digital ocean, amazon ec2, rackspace, azure) with 1 GB RAM. 

LICENSE

GNU General Public License, version 2

Discourse GitHub

Discourse currently has 42,777 commits and 779 contributors.

View Repository: Discourse 

See live Demo: Discourse Q&A 

Explore Discourse in action by checking out their customer forums

2. VANILLA

Vanilla’s open-source product project is a lightweight internet forum package with several optional plugins, including chat, private messages, “Who’s Online”, and attachments.

At first glance, I was blown away by the simple and flexible feel of Vanilla forum.

Vanilla is great for enthusiasts and small businesses.

UNIQUE STANDPOINT OF VANILLA

• Customized theme: Vanilla lets you completely customize the site theme. Customize the URL, upload a favicon, add your own CSS and much more.
• Advanced Editor: Recognizes HTML, BBCode and Markdown.
• Powerful User Profiles: Every member gets a profile that they can customize with their personal information.
• Avatars: Vanilla hosts a free service called Vanillicon.com that generates cool looking icons for users who have not uploaded profile pictures.
• Auto-Save: Vanilla auto-saves your content as you are entering it so that you can close the window on purpose or by accident, and your hard work will not be lost.
• Real-Time Preview & Edits: Members can preview their comments in real time right in the page, and they can edit their existing comments right in the page as well.

FEATURES OF VANILLA FORUM

1. Integrations: Connect Vanilla to 2000+ Apps using Zapier, easy single sign-on from WordPress sites, create tickets on Zendesk, connect to several repositories in your GitHub account and more.
2. Private Messaging: Users can have private one-on-one discussions, or they can bring multiple people into the conversation.
3. Smart History: Vanilla puts you right where you stopped reading the last time you were in a discussion.
4. Powerful Searches: Autocomplete helps users find what they are looking for quickly.
5. Multi-Forums: Large communities sometimes need to be sub-divided. Multi-forum management provides solutions to better manage large forums.

BUILD TECHNOLOGIES

Vanilla is written in PHP scripting language using the Garden framework.

Its backend database is MySQL.

LICENCE

 GNU General Public License, version 2

Vanilla GitHub

Vanilla currently has 32,432 commits and 125 contributors.

View Repository: Vanilla

See  live Demo: Vanilla Q&A

See Vanilla showcase here: Customers Forum

3. ASKBOT

Askbot is a free and open-source question and answer forum web application built upon the foundation of OSQA (Open Source Question and Answer).

OSQA is a one-time popular open source Q&A platform for enterprises.

Unfortunately, OSQA is no longer maintained and Askbot was developed with the source code.

Askbot provides efficient question-and-answer knowledge management. It enables focused on-topic discussions.

FEATURES OF ASKBOT

1. Admin Interface: Admins can customize the forum software by uploading a logo, providing moderator position to a member, adjusting the reputation threshold, and so on.
2. Authentication: The user authentication system supports traditional password authentication methods and federated protocols – OpenID and OAuth.
3. Deployment: Askbot can work with other applications written using the Django Framework.
4. Reputation/Karma: The most important content is highlighted via votes, while the karma system highlights experts and encourages users to provide their best. Users are rewarded with karma for providing helpful information, which is affected by upvoting and downvoting.
5. Editing: Almost everything can be changed. Askbot has wiki model features, so users can edit both their questions and their answers. The entire history of edits is saved and displayed on the page as revisions.
6. Tagging and Categorizing: Askbot has basic tagging functionality, so users can create tags and label questions with them.
7. Theming: The website’s appearance can be customized via Askbot’s theming system.

BUILD TECHNOLOGIES

Askbot is written in Python and Django.

LICENSE

GNU General Public License v3

Askbot currently has 6,990 commits and 101 contributors.

View Repository: GitHub

See sample: Askbot Q&A

4. SCOOLD

Are you looking for an open-source Q&A platform but with the functionalities of Stack Overflow, then Scoold might be the perfect choice for you.

Scoold is a lightweight Stack Overflow clone powered by our Para backend.

It is written in JAVA and can be utilized to get a project quickly off the ground.

FEATURES OF SCOOLD

1. Full-featured Q&A platform
2. Ready for cloud deployment
3. Full-text search
4. Geolocation filtering of posts
5. Reputation system with badges
6. Classic, lightweight frontend
7. Similar posts suggestions
8. Email notification
9. Syntax highlighting
10. Webhooks
11. Backup & Restore
12. Import from Stack Overflow and many more

Scoold also has premium features that are only available in the paid version of Scoold called Scold Pro.

While the free version of Scoold is open source, Scoold pro is a proprietary software.

The premium features of Scoold include:

• @Name Mentions
• SAML support
• File uploads
• Unlimited spaces
• Multiple admins
• Custom authentication
• Email digest
• Wiki-style answers and a few more.

BUILD TECHNOLOGIES

Scoold is written in JAVA.

It runs great on the smallest Heroku dyno and doesn’t require a database.

LICENSE

Apache License 2.0

Scoold currently has 1,268 commits and 22 contributors

View Repository: GitHub

See Live Demo: Scoold Q&A

Scoold does have a simplistic feel and design, but the limitations placed on the free version can be very frustrating.

5. QUESTION2ANSWER

Question2Answer (Q2A) is a free open source Q&A platform built on PHP/MySQL currently running on 24,500+ sites in 40 languages.

FEATURES OF QUESTION2ANSWER

1. Fast integrated search engine.
2. Categories (up to 4 levels deep) and tagging.
3. Voting, comments, follow-on and closed questions.
4. Points-based reputation management.
5. RSS, email notifications and personal news feed.
6. Create experts, editors, moderators and admins.
7. Easy styling with CSS themes CSS themes.
8. Supports translation into any language.
9. Custom sidebar, widgets, pages and links.
10. SEO features such as neat URLs, microformats and XML Sitemaps.
11. User avatars (or Gravatar) and custom fields.
12. Private messages and public wall posts.
13. Log in via Facebook or others (using plugins).
14. Out-of-the-box WordPress 3+and Joomla! 3.0+ integration.
15. Custom single sign-on support for other sites.
16. PHP/MySQL scalable to millions of users and posts.
17. Safe from XSS, CSRF and SQL injection attacks.
18. Beat spam with captchas, rate-limiting, moderation and/or flagging.
19. Block users, IP addresses, and censor words

From my perspective, the color combination of Q2A appears atheistically pleasing.

I also like the fact that it supports translation into any language and takes about 5 minutes or less to install.

BUILD TECHNOLOGIES

PHP and MySQL

LICENSE: GNU General Public License version 2

Question2Answer currently has 1,377 commits and 22 contributors

View Repository: GitHub

See Live Demo: Question2Answer

Your Preferred Choice

The Quora open-source alternatives mentioned above are enough to kick-start your next forum project.

Each of these Q&A platforms has its own pros, cons and features and it’s up to you to make a choice that best suits your intended task.

As a developer, there are four things to look out for when selecting an open-source project.

1. Installation Guide
2. Proper Documentation
3. Active Q&A Github Profile
4. Forum Flexibility

Apart from being a consumer, open-source platforms will see a spike in functionalities if every developer reading this article can make contributions to their preferred open-source project.

If you’re a beginner developer, watch this short video below to learn how to contribute to an open-source project on GitHub.

Readers Request🏆

There have been reports from Quora users complaining about receiving death threats on the platform, people stalking other users down to their family members and many other depressing acts.

All these negative vibes just because they shared their opinions on some critical subject matters.

Is Quora still safe for users all over the world?

How about user’s privacy when across the platform? is there any form of data breach on Quora?

See our recently published article on Quora’s safety and security through the link below.

Is Quora safe?