Purpose – Nowadays, people increasingly seek information and ask for help on Question and Answer (Q&A) sites. The enormous success of Stack Exchange0F0, a constantly growing network of Q&A sites, attests this increasing trend. The success of Q&A mainly depends on the will of their members to provide good quality answers to others’ questions. We investigate the success factors of Q&A that is those factors that foster effective knowledge creation and sharing. In particular, we focus those factors that can be acted upon by contributors when writing a question. Design/methodology/approach – Based on literature in the domain, we build an empirical model of the factors that predict the chance of getting a useful answer when asking a question on a Q&A site. The actionable factors in our model are grouped into three categories of features: Presentation Quality, Time, and Affect. We use a multivariate logistic regression framework for estimating the probability of success of a question based on our set of predictors, that is the metrics that operationalize affect, time and presentation quality. Stack Exchange makes user-contributed content freely available under Creative Commons license, which we use in our empirical studies. Originality/value – Previous research shows how the success of a question depends on its presentation quality (Treude et al. 2011, Asaduzzaman et al. 2013), on the day and time in which it is posted (Bosu et al. 2013), and on the asker’s reputation (Althoff et al. 2014). The influence of affective factors is less evident. However, we argue that the path to effective question answering also involves consideration of emotions (Novielli et al., 2014). Our ongoing research aims at filling this gap in literature by further investigating the role of affect in Stack Exchange. Practical implications – The expected output of this ongoing research will be a user-driven netiquette for online Q&A sites. It will shed new light on how emotion expression facilitates or impairs effective knowledge sharing, leading to guidelines for fostering emotional awareness computer-mediated interactions. In details, we aim at defining new empirically driven guidelines in order to inform the design of emotional interface, provide new insights on how to successfully exploit social Q&A sites in professional knowledge sharing, develop tools for embedding emotional intelligence into online Q&A communities to support both novice users and community managers.