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Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 9th, 2010 at 6:56 am

Featured Questions

Yesterday, we launched a new feature that showcases some great questions from the nearly two million that have been asked and answered on Answerbag.

Sometimes, we might feature an older question from the archives, and other times it might be more recent. But when you spot the "Featured Question" modle on the question page, feel free to check it out—and even provide an all-new answer of your own!

13 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 5th, 2010 at 2:38 pm

Friday upgrades

We've made some improvements sitewide to make things a bit snappier at our peak times of the day. We've also made a tweak to try to notify you even sooner when you have a new "Alert" for answers and the like.

A few other changes, requested by AB-Rich, addressed some Mod needs, so now it should easier than ever for them to keep things clean and tidy.

Have a great weekend! We expect a full points fix for the dancing numbers by Monday.

15 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 3rd, 2010 at 3:07 pm

A quick improvement for Polls

We made a tweak to the Polls page today. Now, as you browse through all the polls on the site, you can see how many votes each poll has at a glance. Cast the tiebreaker! Cast the first vote! Or, just join the chorus of voters on all the issues up for a vote on Answerbag...

17 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 2nd, 2010 at 2:07 pm

Answer images, easier asking, smarter reporting, and more

Some fun stuff today:

1. Answer images.
Now, when you're submitting answers to questions, if you want to upload an image, you can! For the time being, this is limited to the answer form at the top of the question page; when you click at the top there to answer a question, you'll see an optional link to upload an image. Yay!

2. Easier asking.
In our unceasing quest to simplify the process of asking questions, we've tweaked things and streamlined them a bit more. Let us know what you think!

3. "Report This" context-aware.
A common complaint! Now, when you click "Report this" on questions, you'll continue to see the 'Bad tags' and 'Wrong category' report options, but those won't be shown if you're reporting answers or comments, since they don't apply there.

We've also made more behind-the-scenes optimizations, and some extra tools to help out our Mods.

We're continuing to investigate the points issue I posted about earlier today, and hope to have a fix soon.

23 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 2nd, 2010 at 5:28 am

The Points Dance

As many of you have noticed, the point totals on the Leaderboards and on your profile have been hopping around a bit day by day, including dropping down.

We're investigating what's causing that issue, and hope to fix it quickly.

The good news is, we recalculate the overall points from scratch each day, so no raw numbers have been lost.

8 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 1st, 2010 at 12:56 pm

Lots to like, and strengthened spam prevention

By popular request, you'll now get alerted on your profile when someone "likes" your questions or answers on the site. That way, you can know more easily about all the likes your content is receiving, and who's doing the liking.

Additionally, we rolled out some fancier spam catching tools to make things even more difficult for the evil-doers who attack Answerbag more with bogus questions as the site gets increasingly popular. I can't go into too much detail, but trust that we've stepped things up a notch on our end, although we're resigned to acknowledging that the war against spammers is a long one.

More to come! And of course, we hope you like it! ;)

19 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

February 26th, 2010 at 12:26 pm

Fixes for likes

A few members had encountered an issue where we didn't always properly display their likes on answers. The issue mostly arose when you clicked to "like" an answer on the individual answer "permalink" page, and then checked on the regular full question page.

The good news: It's fixed!

37 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

February 25th, 2010 at 2:36 pm

About those spammers...

You've seen their annoying, obnoxious posts cluttering up the site, advertising ridiculous things and providing no benefit to our community.

I don't want to go into too much detail, but we've taken some steps to make their abuse of our site less bothersome, and we'll continue to monitor that situation closely. We hate those spammers just as much as you do. Grrrr.

14 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

February 24th, 2010 at 12:16 pm

Fixes, features, and refinements

1. One of my favorite new features, the Questions I Could Possibly Answer page, now works a bit better in a couple ways.
First, it's now more focused on your favorite categories of questions to answer, rather than your most-highly-rated answers, since that was a bit too easily swayed by question popularity. Second, we now don't show you your own questions to answer!

2. Filters on category pages work better.
When you click on "polls" and "debates" filters in a category, it should show you both content types. Previously, it was showing the dreaded "No questions match" message.

3. Categories now show up on the categories page.
That sounds a bit redundant. But, for example, the Legal page shows questions that are from deeper categories too, like ("Legal > Divorce > Contesting a Divorce"). Now you can more quickly see precisely which sub-category a question is classified in.

4. Optimizations.
Finally, we made some new behind-the-scenes tweaks that should help prevent the site from lagging at peak times.

More soon!

9 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

February 23rd, 2010 at 1:29 pm

Making little things easier, fixing bugs

A host of fixes and improvements to small but frustrating elements of the site went live today:

1. Flagged questions, going forward, should be removed from the Questions page immediately, as soon as the flags are approved by a Mod.
Previously, they could stick around that page for far too long even after the questions themselves were removed. We'll expand this fix to other pages (i.e., category pages) soon.

2. Possible fix for disappearing comments.
It'll take a couple days to be sure, but we hope to have addressed an issue where comments occasionally disappear from an answer. We inherited this bug from the old version of the site, and we're trying our darndest to eliminate it.

3. Better "dupe check" when you add questions.
When you ask a question on Answerbag, we try to show you possible ways that question has already been asked on the site. (We all hate duplicate questions, right?!) Until today, the dupe-checker was resource intensive on your computer and on our servers—and it wasn't especially accurate, either. Now, it's far less intensive, and far more relevant. Win-win!

4. It's now easier to report questions as being in the wrong category.
The category search box was too small to use well. Now it's bigger and easier to read.

5. It's now way easier to flag duplicate questions.
We used to require that you paste in the URL of the duplicated question. Now, we'll offer up some guesses about which question the original one duplicates, and you can just click on one to select it as the dupe.

6. If you start asking a question from the homepage, the character countdown and potential duplicate questions appear instantly on the main ask page, providing a more consistent and accurate asking experience.

Plenty more to come!

12 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

February 22nd, 2010 at 2:11 pm

Questions you might be able to answer...

We're working on some bugs and new features behind-the-scenes right now. (We're especially focused on an issue where answers/comments sometimes temporarily seem to disappear for some of you.)

But we still wanted to launch one new feature today:

Questions I Could Possibly Answer...

Basically, we look at answers you've written that have been well-liked, and then try to find new, unanswered questions in similar categories, and show them to you. Many of them you may well not be inclined to answer, and that's okay. If we expose just a small one or two questions each day that you're perfectly suited to answer, that's still a success in my book!

As always, let us know what you think :)

18 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

February 19th, 2010 at 1:20 pm

Polls fix, bigger Happening Now page, and more

Happy Friday!

First and most importantly, we've rolled out a fix for polls. We recently introduced a bug that prevented poll options with apostrophes or quotation marks from saving properly; I think my brand new poll proves that that's been fixed!

Also today, we've made the Happening Now page a bit bigger when you first load it. Like the module on the homepage, it should grow as new questions and answers are added to the site. But now it starts out with 30 recent updates to display, instead of the same ten showing on the homepage.

We also made some refinements to the blog archive.

Finally, based on some suggestions from wise folks like our CL BigDaddyBS, we've created a new Staff/Mod/CL tool that allows us to more easily find and identify "Great Answers" — with your help. The tool makes it easier for us to review Asker's Picks to see if they should be upgraded to the "Great" label (which of course also awards 5 points).

How can you help? By making sure you use Asker's Pick judiciously. Applying that label to every answer to your question, or as a thank-you for answering weakens the importance of the badge, and makes it tougher for our Mod/CL team to find the truly great answers. (Don't forget, you can always thank your answerers by clicking "Like" on their responses.) Reserver your Pick for answers that truly speak to you or help you out... And we'll keep looking for the insanely great ones to reward and feature even more prominently.

Have a great weekend!

49 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

February 18th, 2010 at 12:54 pm

New 'Polls' leaderboard, editing, and blog archives

Another day, another new leaderboard. Today, we unveiled The Most Voted-Upon Polls Over the Past 30 Days leaderboard, which is a mouthful, but a cool way to see (and recognize!) who's posting the most popular polls.

Also today, by request, we exposed the archives for our old blog posts. Relive the history of Answerbag as told through oodles of old blog posts spanning back many years.

Finally, yesterday we launched the ability to edit your answer comments and blog comments for up to 20 minutes after you post them. It works much the way editing answers already does.

As always, let us know what you think!

11 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

February 17th, 2010 at 2:05 pm

Another new leaderboard, other key fixes

By request, we've added a new leaderboard list, and this one's a bit different from the others. It ranks new questions from the past week based on the number of answers they've received. It's limited to 100 questions, and it's a great way for any member, new or old, to get noticed. Check it out!

We fixed some modules on the homepage. The "recent topics" module was often blank or presenting imperfect data. It shouldn't do that anymore!

We also fixed a bug with new polls that would get unnecessary slashes added to them.

More soon!

34 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

February 16th, 2010 at 12:33 pm

Bigger Leaderboards, big fixes, and more

It's Tuesday, and you know what that means: Another batch of Answerbag improvements!

1. Bigger Leaderboards!
Now, instead of just showing you the top 50 members in each category, we'll show you the top 10,000! Go find yourself! Additionally, Community Leaders have been restored to their place on the Leaderboards.

2. A fix for cut-off answers.
Some question pages were cutting off before the first answer appeared. That's now fixed.

3. Prevent malicious on-site messages.
A few hundred of you got on-site spam from some jerk. We've implemented stricter safeguards to block that sort of thing.

4. Flagged questions go bye-bye.
Members noted that questions which had been removed by staff or moderators would continue to live on the category pages. That's now been addressed. Generally, flagged questions should trickle off those pages within 30 minutes going forward.

We'll be rolling out more fixes, more leaderboards, and more new features over the next few weeks, so keep that seatbelt fastened!

26 comments | Post one

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