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News: Fix for answers that wouldn't save

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Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 19th, 2010 at 7:11 am

Fix for answers that wouldn't save

After last night's maintenance, we believe we've corrected the issue where some members couldn't get their new answers to save properly.

Let us know if your answers still won't save, and have a great weekend!

3 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 18th, 2010 at 5:38 pm

Scheduled downtime Thursday night; other announcement

First and most importantly, Answerbag will be going offline tonight, Thursday March 18th, beginning around 10pm Pacific time. This downtime is to address a serious issue where some members are unable to post answers to questions successfully.

We suspect that the downtime will last no longer than two hours. The site will be inaccessible during that time, but when we come back, the impossible answering bug should be fixed.

One other announcement:

Some of you may see a new(er) version of the question page. We're testing out some refinements, so if you see the page looking a bit different, do not adjust your computer :) We're doing a bit of experimenting. If you don't see the new question page yet, we'll roll it out wider in the future, if it works as well as we hope in testing!

We apologize for the downtime and the answering bug; we know both are frustrating. Smooth sailing soon!

2 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 16th, 2010 at 5:50 pm

On a related note...

We're making some big shifts behind the scenes here to improve the "related questions" that we show on question pages.

Starting today, when you're browsing questions from "Is a giraffe sacred" to "Who invented the zipper", the related questions we show should be more relevant or closely-related than ever before.

Certainly, you'll find some questions where the relationship is a bit more tenuous. But on the whole, these related questions should be a major step up from how things were before.

Browse around, and let us know what you think!

6 comments | Post one

Lex Friedman Lex Friedman

March 12th, 2010 at 9:00 am

Getting to the Points

First, I am racked with guilt to push down Rich's post about our newest Community Leaders; Brian I and The Chief are incredible additions, and I hope you'll join me in celebrating their new roles with the site.

But, I did want to make an important, twofold announcement regarding points:

1. We've identified the cause of the "points dance," and expect that points will stop jumping around by the end of the day.

2. Whatever point levels you've seen for yourself to date on the new Answerbag, they're likely about to bump a bit higher. We uncovered a bug — my own bug, to be specific — that meant we failed to properly award points for several hundred thousand older question and answer flags. Properly honoring those flags will cause some increases in points and some parallel rejiggering of the Leaderboards.

I sincerely apologize for the presence of the bug. I'm delighted, of course, to correct that issue, and expect the site will reflect it within 1 to 24 hours from this post's time.

48 comments | Post one

AB-Rich AB-Rich

March 11th, 2010 at 9:38 pm

Welcome Brian I and The Chief: our two newest Community Leaders!

It always sounds a bit odd to welcome folks who have been such an integral part of Answerbag for so long, but please join me in welcoming Brian I and The Chief as our newest Community Leaders!

If you're not familiar with what Community Leaders do, they're longtime members who have volunteered to help us moderate the site. If you have questions about how things work, or want to report questionable behavior on the site, notify a Community Leader and they can intervene. The current Community Leaders are:

* Galeanda
* Lyn
* Barcaluv
* BigDaddyBS
* Brian I
* The Chief

Thanks to all our hardworking CLs!

Rich

22 comments | Post one

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!

17 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.

16 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.

10 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

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