Live Q&A
Audience asks, upvotes the best questions.
Free to use · No sign-up needed
Your share link and your manage link appear here once the Q&A is made.
Take questions from a room without the microphone queue
The last ten minutes of a talk are a lottery. Three hands go up, two of them belong to the same person who always asks, the microphone takes forty seconds to arrive, and the question everybody in the room actually wanted answered stays in the head of somebody who was not going to put their hand up in front of two hundred people. A Q&A page fixes the part that is fixable: everyone types at once, everyone votes on what they want asked, and the room’s own answer to “what should we spend ten minutes on” is on the screen before you get there.
So this one asks for a subject and nothing else. No account, no email address, no workspace to be invited to. Press Create Q&A and you get a short link to read out and a second link that is yours alone. Everyone else opens the first one, types a question, and upvotes the ones already there.
How to run one
- Name the thing people are asking about. “Questions for the all-hands” is enough; a subject stops the first three questions being about the wrong meeting.
- Press Create Q&A. Two links come back.
- Share the first — six characters, so it can be read aloud or written on a whiteboard.
- Keep the second. It is the manage link, and it is the only way to mark anything answered.
- Put the board on a screen if you have one, and let it fill while you talk.
- Work from the top down. Read one out, answer it, mark it answered, and the next one moves up for everybody.
Three things worth knowing before you start
Upvotes are one per person per question, and reversible. Pressing the button a second time takes your upvote back, so nobody is stuck with a vote they regret and nobody can stack ten of them on their own question. The count beside each one is printed as a number, not just implied by the order, so the board survives a greyscale screenshot and a photograph taken from the back of the room.
The Q&A expires ninety days after the last question. Every question and every upvote pushes that date out, so a page people are still using does not go anywhere. When ninety quiet days pass the page stops working and everything in it is deleted within a day, and there is no way to bring it back. Signing in from your manage link keeps a Q&A from expiring in the first place.
Anyone with the link can write anything. There is a word filter, and it is a first line rather than a wall. Every question carries a Report link that takes that one question off the air on a single click, the page carries one that takes the whole room down, and your manage link is what puts either back. Open this to a room you would open a whiteboard to.
Good uses
- The Q&A slot at the end of a talk, a webinar or a conference session.
- An all-hands, where the question people want asked is rarely the one somebody will ask out loud.
- A classroom or a lecture, where thirty questions arrive at once instead of four hands going up.
- An AMA with somebody who has half an hour and wants to spend it on what the room cares about.
When to use something else
A Q&A ranks questions; it does not choose between options somebody has already written down, and that is Live Poll. If you want a pile of short answers rather than questions — one word each, repeats making a word bigger — that is Idea Cloud. And if what you need is a conversation rather than a queue, this is the wrong shape: there are no replies here, on purpose, because a thread under every question is a second room nobody is watching.
Questions people ask
- Does anyone need an account?
- No. You make the Q&A, you send the link, and people ask. Nobody has to sign up, nobody has to give an email address, and nobody installs anything. The organiser can sign in if they want to keep it past ninety days and find it again without the link — that is the only thing an account does here, it is optional, and it changes nothing for anybody else. The link works in whatever browser is already open, which is the phone in their hand.
- Can people ask without giving their name?
- Yes, and most will. The name box is optional and a blank one goes up as “Anonymous”. If you do type a name, Gleekit remembers it for the next page you use — it lives in your browser and is only sent when you actually ask something. The quiet question is the one this tool exists for, so nothing forces anybody to sign it.
- How many questions and upvotes does one person get?
- As many questions as they have, and one upvote per question — press it again to take it back. You can upvote your own question, which is fair enough: you thought it was worth asking. The only ceiling is the site's rate limit, sixty entries an hour from one connection, which is there to stop a script and not a person.
- Can I get rid of a question I do not want up there?
- Yes. Your manage link has a Remove button on every question, which takes it off the board for everybody and takes its words out of the page's data. You can put it back from that page until you leave it; after that it stays off. Anyone in the room can also report a single question, which hides it the same way, and reporting the whole Q&A takes the page down until you restore it.
- What happens to the questions afterwards?
- They stay readable until ninety days after the last question or upvote, then the page stops working and everything in it is deleted within a day. There is no archive and no way to get it back, so screenshot or copy anything you want to keep before then.