Answerbag Blog

We'd like to thank you for "donating" the top part of your screen space to Livestrong.com for the past week. Since we'll soon be taking the banner down, I'd like to invite you to post a link and brief explanation about something you feel is a similarly worthy cause.

...how would you describe Answerbag?

Hi folks,

By popular demand, we've simplified the Outside the Bag subcategories as follows:

Outside the bag
» Could you, would you...? (hypothetical situations)
» Deep thoughts (the former crazy thoughts+pondering time)
» First thing that comes to mind (impressionistic answers, including fill in the blank questions)
» Have you ever...? (actual hard-to-categorize situations)
» This or that? (weird and random this or thats only)
» Who would win? (weird and random only)

What do we mean by weird? Remember, Outside the bag was designed for uncategorizable questions, so we'll be looking at content as well as form. For example, questions like:

Could you put a Lexus engine into a Toyota truck?
Have you ever rebuilt a Wankel rotary engine?
Ford or Chevy?

should be in the appropriate Autos subcategories, not Outside the bag. So please submit and flag accordingly.

We hope this simpler structure will make Outside the bag easier to navigate, and more fun to explore. Comments and suggestions are welcome. And thanks to Bernice for the spark ;).

They've heard us! The guys are working on a way to make Outside the Bag the simple, free place it was always imagined to be, by eliminating some of those endless confusing subcategories. It might take them a little while, and they're still deciding on exactly which subcategories to keep, so if you have any last minute suggestions, now's a great time to post them.

Thanks everyone!

Welcome to my first blog post! Joel and Rich usually have me posting questions on the site that all of you haven't gotten around to asking yet, but today is my turn to speak!

My favorite category is Outside the bag, but did you know its history? One of our moderators, AB-BrazenGirl, thought up the name when we were trying to find a place for those questions that just couldn't be categorized. I love those! But it was so popular, the list of questions got really long, really fast. When that happens we usually add subcategories that we think of, or that people suggest. But wait a sec. Doesn't that mean we're trying to categorize the uncategorizable? What is UP with that? And you should see the poor moderators pulling their hair out trying to judge all of your Wrong category flags in Outside the bag. I feel so bad for them, and I want to help ;).

So I bet Joel and Rich that you guys could come up with some great ideas to keep the happy randomness of Outside the bag, but make it even friendlier to users (and moderators too!). Do you like it how it is, or should we do something else?

Have a great day everyone--and thanks for reading my first blog post ;)!

You may have noticed a few small changes to Answerbag today--now instead of having to go to your profile page to 'Watch this category,' there's a link beneath every question (titled 'Help someone!') where you can do so directly. Also, 'Watch this question' is now next to the 'Submit answer' button.

Both are designed to make it easier for people who prefer to focus on particular questions and/or categories--pretty much the opposite of the New arrivals page, where you see everything in real time.

Which do you prefer?

We've begun to address the long-running debate about moderation points vs. Q&A points by creating a separate moderation leaderboard:

http://www.answerbag.com/stats?board=6

Like the other leaderboards, you can view stats from the past week or all-time. Showing a mod vs. Q&A point division on individual user profiles is harder, so please be patient.

We've also created new leaderboards for members who have the most highly-rated answers:

http://www.answerbag.com/stats?board=7

and questions:

http://www.answerbag.com/stats?board=8

Let us know what you think--and more kudos to our rockin' devs Jon, Adam and Alex who are always cooking up something in the Answerbag laboratory...

It's always more fun to spend time and money on things that show. Like new furniture instead of plumbing repair. But if you're wondering what our devs have been up to lately, and when the new toys are coming, we've actually been doing some much-needed work on the plumbing side.

Some of you may have noticed new breeds of spammers, who never submit a single question or answer, but populate their user profile pages with text and links to Real Replica Kate Spade Bags or Discreet Online Best Price pharmaceuticals--sometimes using 'bots' to create batches of such accounts. They create links to their pages on other sites, hope to get picked up in Google search results, and generally make pests of themselves--in retrospect, maybe termite control would have been a better analogy than plumbing repair ;). Anyway, AB-Jon, Adam, Sunny and the rest of the crew have given us better tools to detect and thwart these new spammers, and they've been working great!

While it's a stretch to take anything positive away from spammer infestations, they wouldn't take the time to do this if Answerbag wasn't so popular--so I guess if you're reading this, you're partially to blame ;).

So please join me in thanking our intrepid devs, and have a good Spring Break, all...

With so many users asking and answering so many questions, sometimes new Q&A can look like a chat transcript:

--Where's user X?
--Who's winning the game tonight?
--Who else can't wait for the new Harry Potter book?
--Is [whoever's in the news at the moment] [hot/kewl/guilty/etc.]?

The difference is time. In a chat there's the assumption of immediacy--who goes back and rereads chat transcripts that are weeks or years old? Answerbag Q&A were initially imagined to be timeless Q&A that never closed, but we've certainly enabled a more conversational approach by limiting constraints on questions, introducing friends lists, RSS feeds and instant notifications, even putting that pesky timer on the home page telling you how quickly questions get answered here.

Immediacy is great, but very often this approach leaves us with Q&A that don't age well. How would you suggest we handle this?

Hi folks,

Some of you have reported that email notifications haven't been going out lately, and also that the leaderboards aren't being updated. We're investigating the problems and suspect they're related. Stay tuned.

And thanks for all the comments on the 'features you don't use' blog. Not that we make decisions about future versions strictly by the numbers, but if a function is taking up X percent of the screen real estate on a given page, and people report using the function far less than X percent of the time, maybe it's a candidate for replacement.

Feel free to carry on with any other suggestions on this blog.