Answerbag Blog

Amidst the usual flurry of glitch and spam reports most blogs attract these days, I'd like to resurrect an old Answerbag November tradition, and ask you to post something you're thankful for.

December will mark my fifth year with Answerbag, so I'd like to say thanks to everyone who makes AB what it is, past, present and future ;).

No, we didn't take the advice of many of you and dump the entire points and rating system ;). You will be returned to your rightful place on the all-time leaderboards as soon as we get them working again.

A little over a month ago, we announced that search on Answerbag would now be powered by Google. We're thrilled with the effect that change has had — namely, tremendously more relevant and useful search results on the site.

Unfortunately, Google search broke a key feature some of our most dedicated members rely upon: The ability to search just your own questions.

I'm pleased to announce that, as of this morning, that oversight has been addressed; you can now search your question history from profile module that appears on many pages. Enjoy!

Greetings, Answerbaggers!

As of today, it should be a wee bit easier for newcomers to join your ranks, as the few, the proud, the registered members of Answerbag.com.

That's because we've now integrated with Facebook Connect. That means you can create an account on Answerbag, and login, strictly by using your existing Facebook account.

Down the line, we hope to introduce (optional) ways to link your existing AB account with Facebook, if you're already registered, and then build in ways to automagically share your questions and answers between both sites. But that's all in the future, and we're not there yet.

Enjoy!

The good news: we did some server upgrades to address the login/logout problem and overall performance.

The bad news: content isn't being updated to people's profile pages or to some pages on the site. You may get a new answer/comment notification but see nothing new on your profile or when you click through to the question/answer page.

Status: we've fixed the memcache errors some of you were seeing, but are still tracking down the update problem. Please bear with us, and thanks for all the reports--they really help target the problem.

We're getting reports of people not being able to view certain answers, i.e. you get the "this question has not been answered yet" message when you know the answer is there and valid. This may be related to the problem of merged answers sometimes not appearing when a duplicate flag is accepted.

This doesn't seem to be too widespread at the moment, but if it's happening to you, know that we're looking into it.

We just unveiled a new search engine here on Answerbag. We've heard — and shared! — your complaints regarding Answerbag's search, which often provided suboptimal results.

Our new Google-powered search engine drives the accuracy of our search results up into the stratosphere. We're pretty excited about it.

There are some changes to how search works now — searching will search questions and answers, categories, and also profiles and other pages on the site.

Of course, we're very curious about your thoughts on this. We're considering the Google search engine here a trial while we gauge your feedback. Let us know what you think!

As many of you know our tech team is busy working on improving the search capabilities in AB. It is a high priority and will certainly improve the AB experience. Currently Caitlin and I are the main category moderators that approve or reject your category suggestions. We’ve been having ongoing discussions about what guidelines we should use when it comes to approving or rejecting your suggestions.

We receive 30-50 suggestions a week, and in addition to approving or rejecting those, we are currently in review of all of the categories on AB and we will be removing, editing, or merging many of them with the Category Project. This project as you may recall is our attempt at going in and cleaning out and streamlining categories that may not have any questions or that may be duplicates, as well as subcategories that are in the wrong parent category. This is an ongoing project and will continue for some time. Caitlin did a wonderful job in some health categories and I just completed travel. I am currently working on transportation and automobiles.

Which bring us to this current update. As some of you have noticed we have increased our rejection rate of suggested categories. We have started to look very closely at suggestions that have little or no questions in AB. Many of these suggestions are things like movie titles, book or album titles, actors, celebrities, car models, bands, singers, etc. Before, we approved almost every subcategory, but we are realizing that we will have to impose limits on approvals with little or no questions. Categories reflect what is already on AB and they are not an attempt to comprehensively list all topics within an issue (i.e. all directors, all baseball players, all Harry Potter characters, all Toyota models ever made, etc). Therefore, unless there are at least eight questions in AB on a suggested subject, we will most likely reject it. We will try to be objective in our decisions, but sometimes our own subjectivity comes into play and we will attempt to give some of your category suggestions leeway and approve them. For instance, the car seats category under auto safety currently has only three questions, but we feel it is an important subject that should be included in discussions of auto safety and automobiles.

Some current subcategories, especially subjects such as specific movie titles and celebrities, as well as others mentioned above, will be merged into a parent category and some subcategories eliminated until enough questions are provided by AB users to meet the eight question subcategory minimum. If you have a category you really want to add, start asking and answering questions about it! Categories aren't the end-all be-all of AB, rather it's the questions and answers that are at the heart of AB. If there is a lively discussion of a topic we are much more likely to create a category for it than if there are only a couple of questions from 2006. We really want to create categories for topics that have multiple Q&As, recent/recurring Q&As, and other signs of lively interaction.

So again, we will be adding or removing categories throughout this project. We will also be strict about what we accept, in an effort to make sure each category actually makes AB better and more useful. However, we want to encourage you to continue to submit category suggestions. They help improve our taxonomy and hopefully make it easier to find a question and answer. With the future improved search capability on AB coming in the near future, plus your category suggestions and the current category database, all of this should make the AB experience much more pleasant.

Happy Monday!

Today, the Answerbag team rolled out one major fix you've been asking for, plus some necessary tweaks to protect the site. I'll briefly explain both:

1. First up is a fix for an issue that affected those of you who report spammy users. Sometimes, if you reported a user as spammy, and our dedicated cadre of mods went ahead and nuked that spammy user, a glitch in the system could actually deduct points from you, instead of reward you properly.

We believe that this is now fixed. Let us know what you see over the next few days!

2. AB has been coming under attack from some over-zealous bots that were hitting our search result pages too hard. This actually a) costs us money, and b) makes the site slower for our real human members. Today, we launched several tactics to thwart those bots, including one change that some of you may notice: We're requiring that you have cookies enabled to search Answerbag. Of course, you need cookies enabled to login and really use the site effectively, so I don't think this should mar anything for anyone. But, of course — let us know if you run into any problems!

Thanks for any feedback on this.

First, a quick introduction to those who don't recognize my name. I'm Lex Friedman, and I'm working with a new team at Demand Media that's focusing our efforts on Answerbag. We'll be working with Rich, the moderators, the volunteers, and the entire AB community in the weeks and months ahead to bring as much "awesome" to Answerbag as we can manage!

(Long-term members might remember how almost exactly three years ago, long before I ever worked at Demand Media or Answerbag, I won a little video contest here.)

Anyway, when we asked Rich and other community members what some top issues were that we could fix, one that came right to the top of the pile again and again was the problem of questions that were categorized as "Adult" showing up right on the Answerbag homepage, where they don't really belong. We implemented a change this morning that should prevent properly-categorized Adult questions from sneaking their way into the main homepage display from now on. Let us know if you see something amiss, and know that we'll be here hard at work on making AB greater every day -- with your help!