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by mike blair on January 3rd, 2007

mike blair

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Has the AB staff ever considered choosing official AB "moderators?" By choosing a handful of reliable people to handle approval of submissions by newer (lower rated) users, couldn't a lot of the nonsense on AB be dealt with more efficiently?

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  • by mike blair on January 3rd, 2007

    mike blair

    Just because I want to expound on this further, I'm going to answer my own question.

    For those of you that are newer to this site, things used to be quite a bit different around here. It used to be that when you submitted a question or answer, you had to wait a little while before your new submission would be posted. You would get an email telling you that your Q/A had been approved or disapproved. The higher rated users were able to bypass this filter because they were assumed, by their prior submissions, to be adding relevant, helpful, and non-offensive content to the site.

    Here's a link to show you what the site used to look like: http://web.archive.org/web/20050103092525/http://www.answerbag.com/
    Do you notice how relevant and coherent all the questions are? There aren't nine question asking in a slightly different way everyone's opinion about the Saddam Hussein execution, or what's playing on their iPod, or how different their life might be had their parents named them jimmy instead of johnny.

    What I'm suggesting is this: If a handful of people, carefully selected by the staff, were given the duty to review ALL submissions, flagging the ones that MAY be duplicates/offensive/nonsense, the staff could then review the flagged items and decide what to do. The current system DOES NOT WORK.

    Some of the questions that are on here now are totally ridiculous, contain atrocious misspellings, and are, in my opinion, reducing the relevance of this once-great site.

    I'm not saying that all the nonsense "Pondering Time" "Outside the Bag" and "Crazy Thoughts" questions should be gone, just maybe directed away from the main page. I think the home page should be a place for serious, or at least coherent, questions and answers.

    At the very least, this system would get all these questions into the right categories.

    Comments

    • Dude, I've already covered this is another post. Answerbag should ditch the "wait for it" approach and go real time! People searching the net and listing their sources is the way to go. Like a real time Wikipedia.

      -----------

      by ----------- on January 3rd, 2007

    • Thans for the link, mike blair. That was even before I joined. Great answer.

      Jodie44

      by Jodie44 on January 3rd, 2007

    • Yeah Jodie, I think it was before I joined too..I just picked a date at random to show the difference between today's AB and the "classic" AB

      mike blair

      by mike blair on January 3rd, 2007

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