Answerbag Blog

You guys may have noticed the recent influx of questions about "Joomla." Joomla is an open-source content management system and site creator that allows people to create their own sites and add-on modules (Extensions) to build out all sorts of functionality. It's a very popular site-building system, and Answerbag is now host to a large community of Joomla users at http://joomla.answerbag.com/ where, of course, you can learn all about Joomla, what it's for, and how to use it. Welcome, Joomla-ers!

By popular demand, we have now introduced a way to "unsubscribe" from comments on either 1) an answer you posted or 2) an answer you commented on, so these comments won't turn on your "Comments" light anymore, and they won't show up in your "My Feedback" list. To unsub, there are links within your "My Feedback" list and on the answer page itself.

If you find that you want to resubscribe to a comment thread, you can post a new comment in the thread, and you will then see new comments on that thread in your My Feedback list again. We hope this makes it easier for you guys to keep track of the feedback you really care about!

One of the great things about being a part of an online community like Answerbag is that you don't have to be the exact same person you are in real life. Sure, the constraints of expressing yourself through keyboard and screen are a pretty strong filter in themselves, but the Q&A format of Answerbag--and sometimes the anonymity--seem to make some people more outgoing, more friendly, more critical, more *whatever* than they are in real life.

So what about you? Do you feel like the same person in here as you are out there? Or how are you different?

This week we rolled out a couple small fixes you guys had been asking for:

• Duplicate question rejection emails include the text of your question. (Imagine that!)
  
• If you reject someone's friend request, and they ask again, it'll be automatically ignored for a certain period of time. How long, you ask? Well, it gets longer every time it happens...let's just leave it at that.
  
• No single member can have more than 2 new questions show on the homepage, so the spammers can't get out of control.
  

Thanks again for your input, guys!

Our crack Answerbag development team has been dominating the blog with nonstop upgrade news lately, so we thought we'd change things up a bit. We know Answerbaggers are all over the globe, and our staff is spreading out too. The Demand Media/Answerbag HQ is in Santa Monica, California, we have student interns in the Denver area, and I've just accepted a position at the University of Hawaii ;). Our community leaders span an even wider range of time zones.

So where are you, and what times of day are you generally on AB?

Today's release is mostly bugfixes and small tweaks, but we think there's some pretty important stuff in there. Here's what we've got for ya:

• On your own profile, in the "my links" tray, you can now search for your own questions
  
• On other members' profiles, you can search their questions
  
• The Friends' Q&A light, by default, will only come on for Friend questions (unless you click to see "answers" in the Friends' Q&A list as well)
  
• RSS Feeds for Friends Q&A (at bottom of Friends Q&A list)
  
• RSS Feeds for blog posts and blog comments (On main blog page)
  
• Sorting of answers when coming from the homepage is now correct
  
• You can no longer give ratings to rejected questions or answers to rejected questions
  
• We fixed the occasional slowness when posting comments
  

We'll keep at it, trying to make the site better for you guys. Thanks for your support and feedback!

I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome our first four members to be appointed as Community Leaders! Our first CL's are Carmella, Stableboy, LynfromNM and Eli Lies, all stalwarts of the Answerbag community for quite some time now, and all around good people.

Community Leaders will be helping us moderate the site, deal with trolls in a timely manner, and generally keep the useless content off the site. They do not receive points for their moderation, and are just doing it out of the kindness of their hearts and their desire to see AB remain a fun, friendly place. We are very happy to be enlisting their services, and are grateful that they have agreed to help. Please show them some support!

Also released today:
- Ratings tools should be more responsive
- You can choose "Educational" or "Conversational" when asking your question
- Question page should be fixed on Firefox for a Mac

With the success of the conversational/educational flag, we can now put questions in their appropriate topical category, instead of our previous approach of putting Social Q&A in Outside the bag. So some of the new Outside the bag subcategories (This or That, What's your favorite, etc.) have been removed--they're now titled "Recategorize me!" and there are lots of moderation points to be had for those of you who'd like to go through and suggest more appropriate topical categories for the many questions that have found their way there.

Of course, there may be a few questions that still belong in Outside the bag or one of its subcategories, but try to err on the side of a non-Outside the bag category if there's any connection. For example, What's your favorite junk food? should be moved to one of the Food & Dining subcategories.

"Recategorize me!" is just a transitional name for the old categories, and we'll be removing it in a week or two--we just wanted to give you the chance to help out the AB community, and get some serious moderation points in the process.

So from now on, when submitting a question or suggesting a new category for an existing one, always put it in the *most specific* category possible, and if it's social/conversational or expert/educational, flag it as you think best. Soon we'll use these flags to allow you to filter any page to view only those questions that your fellow Answerbaggers have flagged as conversational or educational.

We welcome your feedback and comments (and words of celebration from those of you who lobbied hard for the repeal of This or That...) ;).

Among other updates we rolled out today is a "Hide conversational questions" filter for the homepage. Some people love the conversation, but others prefer to dig into the more meaty topics, so now you have a way to screen out questions that our members have flagged by as "Conversational." We hope that it's helpful for you guys!

Other updates:
- Removed one additional ad placement for members level 20+
- Adult questions no longer show in New Arrivals
- Questions don't get "forgotten" if you have to sign-in during the Ask process
- Updates to the Facebook application including showing your correct level and badge

If you're a regular on Answerbag, you probably recognize a lot of the names you see here day to day. Answerbag now has the ability to help you keep track of your friends and their Q&A easily!

Just go to your friend's profile, and click "Add to friends" in their "Profile" module at the left. Or, you can add friends directly from the member search as well.

You can view friend requests under the Friends tab in your profile.

Then, when your friends ask new questions or provide new answers on Answerbag, you'll see a light come on in your personal profile module at the top right, so you can go check out what your friends have been up to. We hope you guys will enjoy this and it'll be helpful in keeping in touch with people.

Also, you'll notice some ads have been removed, particularly for users over level 20. We realize that these get in the way sometimes, so we hope this makes the site more enjoyable!

On that note, AB-Jon has released several performance upgrades today as well, so it's a pretty big week all around! Hopefully the site is running faster for y'all.