Rachel Globus
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July 28th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
Protest against immigration laws and a call to remove
Fort Snelling image by Fibonacci Blue from Flickr.com, CC-BY
Arizona’s immigration law has inspired heated dissent. Now, the summer is about to get even hotter.
The controversial law took effect on Thursday, July 29—though U.S. district Judge Susan Bolton's ruled to blocked certain portions of it. One of these sections includes the law’s most controversial provision that officers check immigration status while enforcing other laws.
Here on Answerbag, members weighed in as they answered the question, Are you for or against the Arizona immigration law?
Some supporting the new law, like Reverend 4:20, feel "the federal government won't do anything about [it] and the states have every right to enforce their laws." Lawdawg7051 also observes that "the law is the same law that the federal government has in place for its law enforcement." Establishing mechanisms to actually enforce a federal law...why not?
On the other hand, kinetochore argues that "innocent Latino Americans will likely be the target of unfair racial profiling and that they will be harassed by the AZ police even if they're legal." While the bill points out that police cannot use race as the determining factor for questioning people, octoshooter notes: "let's be realistic, the police are going to be going after Hispanic people with this thing (you really think they're going to ask some Caucasian people for their ID?)." This brings up another question: Can the police really enforce this law without racial profiling?
Other Answerbaggers encouraged us to step into the shoes of those directly affected—the legal and illegal residents of Arizona. HEYTHERE points out "the stories of all the crime, drug running, murders, theft, property damage, and even instances of their cattle being killed. Families there are just sick of living in fear." On the other hand, "Where is your empathy? asks Wanderer1. "Here, all middle-class American parents have to worry about is what car they're getting for their child's Sweet 16. In Mexico, it's about getting enough clean water and food for your family. My point is, on the topic of immigration you have to look through the lens of 'What would I do if I was in their position?'"
Clearly, there are a lot more questions here. Below are a few we found:
- Prior to the Arizona Immigration Bill, did any laws exist to prevent illegal immigrants from staying in the United States?
- Is the Arizona immigration law constitutional?
- How does illegal immigration hurt the economy?
More importantly, what are YOUR questions? What’s really important here? What is the mainstream media ignoring? What questions should we be asking ourselves and others?
Let's do what we do best here on Answerbag: Ask away.
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Rachel Globus
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July 28th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to let you all know that we have been reviewing the PRAs that were brought to our attention in the Report a Factual Error in a Professionally Researched Answer forum, and have already worked through a bunch of them. PRAs have been edited, ungreatified, left as is and even removed, accordingly. We, along with other helpful ABers, have also added additional answers to questions that were left incomplete or inaccurate.
We really appreciate all your feedback, and would like to thank those who have taken the time to bring these PRAs to our attention. All your tips and advice help to ensure that Answerbag provides great answers to each and every question!
Thanks again for all your sharp eyes - please keep using the forum as necessary!
Cheers,
Rachel & the Answerbag team
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juliec228
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July 27th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Hey everyone,
Here are some fixes/enhancements we released today:
We removed the default check in your preferences that said you agreed for us to find your Facebook friends, even if your account wasn't connected to Facebook. This was just a layout glitch, it didn't actually affect anything, but was confusing. Now it's off!
We implemented an age verification window for people landing on our adult content. This gives a warning to users about the nature of the content before they can actually access it. We thought it was the right thing to do...we hope you do too :-)
Penalized users could appear in our leaderboards. That is not the case anymore.
Our key priorities this week are releasing our first monthly newsletter (Rachel will tell you more about that soon!), resolving the comments disappearing issue and implemeting a new caching solution that will further speed the site.
We hpoe we can get to all of it. We'll keep you posted on progress.
Cheers!
Julie & the Answerbag Team
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juliec228
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July 22nd, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Hey everyone,
A while ago we told you that we were testing a few different site headers. We wanted to make the "ask a question" and "create a poll" clearer and more prominent. Also, most sites have their login/register profile in the top right, so we wanted to use that best practice convention. We tested it and it worked better in terms of driving more questions and being clearer, so here it is! We hope you like it!
One downside is that we had to remove the blog headline, and instead have a tab for the blog in the nav bar. We will be adding soon a little icon that will let you know when a new post is added to the blog, and thus will serve similar purpose as the headline. Look for it in the next few days.
Cheers,
Julie & the Answerbag Team
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juliec228
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July 21st, 2010 at 10:51 am
Hey everyone,
We launched a few fixes yesterday that I wanted to share.
Special one for Gingermix....and all the other women on the site: we can now claim our gender! Sorry this took us so long to fix, but it's finally done.
Comments disappearing: we made a few changes that we think should help, but more importantly we set up a monitoring system that will help us track the issue every time it occurs, which will help us troubleshoot it more easily. This one has just been very random, and we needed the monitoring to help us track it down. Please continue to share URLs where you see it happen if/when you do. As I said, we made a few fixes that we think should help, but we're not sure it's erradicated the problem completely yet. This is work in progress.
Other fixes: searches containing apostrophes were giving blank results. That's now fixed. We also did a lot to continue improving site speed, and our speed scores are going up. We hope you see that in your daily usage of the site as well. Speed is a constant battle for us (like Spam), so we will continue tweaking and improving the site in that area.
Cheers,
Julie & the Answerbag Team
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juliec228
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July 14th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Hi everyone,
Wanted to give you a head’s up regarding a few tweaks to the registration / login flow.
We’re consolidating our registration and login, and making it easier for Facebook members (there are many!) to join Answerbag and participate in the community. We’re also making all registration and login fit within a dialogue box, so you never have to leave the page you’re on in order to log in or register.
What does this change for existing members?
Really nothing if you pick the “Log in with my Answerbag Account” option. That will lead you to the usual input fields for your username and password. However, you now have the additional option of logging in with your Facebook credentials, which means that you’ll be automatically logged in to Answerbag when you’re logged in to your Facebook account. This makes logging in a whole lot simpler, and lets you use your Facebook avatar and see any Facebook friends who are also on Answerbag. As I mentioned, this Facebook option is…well…AN OPTION…so no obligation to use it if you’re not a Facebook fan! ;-)
If you decide to use your Facebook login, please make sure that when you do it the first time around, you connect your account to that login. You will be prompted to do so in the flow—just make sure to read the steps. You will only have to do that once and then your Facebook login will work every time with your existing Answerbag account.
To start using the new registration flow, you can use this link: http://www.answerbag.com/?newfb=1. This is NOT a test link, so if you do use it and decide to use the Facebook option, it will actually happen.
These changes should be deployed to all users next week, but we wanted to give you a sneak peak now. If you see any bug in the flow, please let us know.
Thanks!
Julie & the Answerbag team
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Rachel Globus
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July 9th, 2010 at 11:59 am
There’s been quite a lively discussion on the site about the professionally researched answers (PRAs), and it’s caused quite a bit of discussion around here as well. Some fastidious ABers have brought up the issue of factual errors or omissions in these answers, and have asked for a way to address this.
And since Answerbag is all about asking and answering, here’s our answer: We’ve started a new discussion topic in the Forums that will be exclusively dedicated to collecting, tracking, investigating and remediating problem PRAs. Why via the forums? Well, we’ve noticed rumors and myths floating around about PRAs, so we want to address concerns out in the open, where everyone can monitor the progress and see the reasoning behind decisions. Plus, it’s the quickest way to start fixing the issue. Plus, call us softies, we just plain like the forums.
Here’s how it will work: If you find a PRA that appears to be factually incorrect or is missing crucial information, go to the PRA discussion topic and post a reply including the question title, URL, what’s incorrect and why, and your evidence that it’s incorrect. We’ll review the submissions, and determine how to resolve the issue. Here’s how we’ll treat them. If the answer is…
-- Missing non-crucial information: We’ll leave as is. ABers are always encouraged, of course, to add your tips and perspectives. Keep in mind that what you consider to be “crucial” may not be what Joe ABer considers crucial, so we’ll be respectful of this as we evaluate each PRA.
-- Missing critical information but not wrong: We’ll ungreatify it. And, if there is a truly great answer there from the community, we will greatify that answer instead. That way, you get credit for your high-quality answer, and visitors to that question don’t miss out on good information in the PRA.
-- Flat out wrong and/or dangerous: We’ll remove it. We don’t want dangerously incorrect answers on the site any more than you do, and we appreciate your efforts in helping us identify PRAs that don’t meet Answerbag standards.
We’ll do our best to work through the queue as quickly as possible.
To start things off, we’ve combed the site high and low to find PRAs you’ve already pointed out, and those will be the first we investigate. Please help others out by pointing them to the forum topic if they see a PRA with an issue, and posting PRAs there if you see a problem.
Also, take a gander at this post -- 6 Myths about PRAs—Busted! -- which may help respond to other points you've brought up.
Let the fact-checking begin!
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Rachel Globus
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July 8th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Earlier today, some of you may have noticed a slight change to the home page. To the right of the Happening Now section, we’ve added a leaderboard module displaying the ABers who asked the questions that have generated the most answers in the past 7 days.
This means that if you ask a thought-provoking question that inspires lots of answers—like PrimeFactor’s question, Atheists, non-believers, etc.: If your child wanted to go to church on their own, their own choice, would you encourage or discourage them?—you can now be featured on the home page.
This leaderboard changes often, so everyone will have an opportunity to see their name front and center, whether they’re a Beginner like wanikiya (#2 on the list currently) or an Illuminati like Zack (#7).
You all ask a lot of great questions, and now you’ll be recognized when one of your questions sparks debate and discussion here on AB. The full 100 most answered questions in the past 7 days, as well as the rest of the leaderboards, are available here.
Congrats to the first 10 ABers on the home page now!
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AB-Rich
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July 1st, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Just wanted to pause a bit and reflect on the latest milestone: 9 million answers! Yes, these do include answers that have since been removed as spam etc., as well as the Professionally Researched Answers (PRAs) that have recently engendered some welcome critical feedback, but the vast majority have been posted by you, and deserve big kudos.
Some of the things we're working on include fixing the longstanding disappearing comments and fluctuating points bugs, ways for people to report PRAs as duplicates or inaccurate, and ways to filter out AB-generated content entirely, so you can focus on interacting with people through questions, answers and comments. So when we get all of that done...what do you think we should do to commemorate the 10 millionth answer?
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Lex Friedman
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June 24th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Today, we're inviting anyone who's interested to start testing out a new Answerbag feature called LiveStream.
First, some background: To us, one of the most important things a social Q&A site like ours needs is the promise of fast, helpful answers. Most questions that get posted on Answerbag each day also get answered. But we want to take extra steps to ensure that your questions are getting answered as quickly and accurately as possible.
That's where LiveStream comes in. The idea is this: We automatically study all the answers you provide, to figure out the categories where you're most confident about answering questions. Then, when you're logged into Answerbag, we'll occasionally display small notices on the bottom corner of your screen, suggesting questions we think you might be able to answer.
Generally speaking, these will be very new questions that don't have any answers yet. If you do answer the question, and then your answer turns out to be helpful (as determined by other members, community leaders, moderators, and staff), you'll receive five bonus points.
We think this is a win-win: Folks posing questions should get their answers even faster. Folks looking to share answers will be shown questions that they might not have discovered on their own, and get rewarded for answering them more quickly.
LiveStream is still in beta, and right now the only way to enable it for your account is to click this special link. You should see your first "alert" within a few moments, and you can customize the frequency of alerts, and the category of questions we'll suggest for you, with ease.
Of course, we welcome your feedback and would love to hear what you think in the comments!
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juliec228
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June 9th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Hi all,
Here are a few updates and fixes the team has been working on over the past 10 days or so.
Killed all database errors - at least for the time being :-) These bad boys tend to come haunt us occasionally and make the site unavailable to some users. We haven't seen any failure since Friday, so looks like we did well there so far.
Lauunched email notifications for friend requests and "great answer" selection. As with all email notifications, you can opt out at any point through the preference settings on your profile.
Fixed several ie7 display issues for our ie7 users (don't hesitate to upgrade to 8 though!!!).
When you flag a Featured Question on the Topic Page, that question is no longer added to your profile (thus avoiding some unpleasantness - ask Rich G ;-)).
And as you know, we are aware of the caching issues that delay publishing of comments, and it's on our list to fix. It's just proved pretty challenging to pin point so far.
We'll keep you posted.
Thanks!
Julie & the Answerbag Team
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juliec228
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June 7th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Hey everyone,
Wanted to give you a head’s up that we are testing new header treatments for the site. We’re playing around with the search box placement and trying to give more prominence to the “Ask” and “Create a poll” features. This is only on a small portion of the site traffic, so you might never see it, but wanted to make sure you all knew in case you did land in a test bucket. This should have no site impact.
Cheers!
Julie & the Answerbag Team
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Lex Friedman
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June 3rd, 2010 at 8:33 am
Hi folks,
We've been doing tons of work and testing on a feature we codenamed "Project Speedy." Its aim is to help questions get answered faster, and to help answerers find questions that they might like to answer more easily.
Unfortunately, this feature snuck out the backdoor last night and went live for almost all our members, which wasn't supposed to happen. What's worse is, it's misbehaving, asking you questions over and over again like the annoying guy at a party who can't take the hint.
This is definitely not how we wanted to introduce this feature; we're pretty excited about what it will mean for askers and answerers alike. Our team is working on first disabling the alerts for the time being, and then fixing the issue where it's misbehaving and asking over and over again, and finally re-releasing it for mods, staff, and community leaders — the only folks for whom the feature was supposed to be present anyway.
I apologize for the inconvenience, and promise we'll roll out a fix later this morning.
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juliec228
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June 2nd, 2010 at 10:05 pm
Hey everyone,
Some of you might have noticed the site being intermittently unavailable today. We were experiencing some database issues which we solved mid-day.
Wanted to apologize for the inconvenience some of you might have experienced.
Thank you for your patience.
Julie & the Answerbag Team
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juliec228
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May 18th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
For those of you who were being blocked from answering questions, we think we've resolved that issue. We're still looking into why it occurred, but at least it shouldn't happen anymore. If you still experience issues, please send your username and profile URL to support to help us further investigate.
We had also received feedback from new members who weren't incrementing points. This is also resolved. This was only impacting new members with no initial points. Fortunately no points were lost and we were able to put all those points into their accounts, and new points should come in now regularly.
Thanks everyone!
Julie & the Answerbag Team
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