Answerbag Blog

We'd like to try something new this week. It's a little experiment that we hope will help us make the site better and more useful for you guys in the long run. Here's the plan:

You can now vote on any question and tell us if it's conversational or educational, that is, if the question is there to educate and help people, or if it was posted to spark conversation. Once you vote, you'll see how everyone else voted on that question. We aren't currently using these votes to change how you view or use the site, but we plan to release those features later once we see how well the feature is adopted.

I'm sure you're already familiar with both types of questions, but here's a few examples:

Educational: Where is the fusebox for my Ford Ranger?
Conversational: Who here owns a Ford?

Educational: How can I break up with my boyfriend?
Conversational: What's the worst thing you can say to your boyfriend?

Educational: Who wrote "War and Peace"?
Conversational: What's the last book you read?

Naturally, there will be questions that are borderline which is why we allow you guys to vote, so the majority rules. Please give it a shot, and let us know what you think.

And, of course, there's a new round of improvements to our Facebook application! Among the highlights:

- Badges and levels now show on your profile and next to your answers
- When you post a question, you can easily inform your friends

Back by popular demand are Category Suggestions! If you see that we're missing a category that we really should have, click the "Suggest category" link on any category page (under the list of subcategories). We'll review your suggestion, and if it looks like an important topic or one that we already have a lot of questions for, we'll add it to Answerbag!

We also released several bugfixes this week for the Answerbag Facebook application (http://apps.facebook.com/answerbag/ ), as well as a feature that helps you invite your friends on Facebook to use the Answerbag application. So all of you great 'baggers out there, please support the bag by inviting your friends!

Social networks are all the rage these days, or "the bomb" as the kids say, so when Facebook opened up their walls other sites, we figured it was time to bring Answerbag's Q&A to social networking. What does this mean, you ask? Is it about connectivity, or Web 2.0, or platforms, or APIs? No, here's what it really means:

- As a Facebook member, you can now ask & answer questions directly on Facebook! Your question will show up on Facebook and Answerbag, for anyone to answer. (Facebook allows you to set your privacy level.)

- When you ask a question on Facebook, your Friends on Facebook can see your questions so they know when to go answer! And, you can see when any of your friends ask a question!

- You can link your Facebook account with your Answerbag account so all of your old Answerbag questions show up in your Facebook account!

Here's the link for the application:
http://apps.facebook.com/answerbag/

It's brand new and we're still working out some kinks, but we'd love to hear your feedback. We hope that this will help Answerbag Q&A find new audiences because more answerers means better answers!

Other updates today:
- Two shiny new leaderboards will appear on Sunday
- Date sorting of answers should work properly

Thank you all for your help in testing the Beta Search - we put in some final tweaks, and it is now live on the site!

The other big change is that now, if you're on the homepage and you click on a question with answers, the answers are sorted by *date* by default rather than by rating. This allows new aswers to get ratings rather than getting pushed to page 2 or 3 if the question is popular. If you come from any other page to view the question, it will still be sorted by rating. If, however, you don't like this setting on the homepage, you can turn it off! Just go to your profile and edit your preferences.

Also new: more leaderboards! As soon as our stats get updated (Sunday night), you'll also see leaderboards for "Most inquisitive" and "Most answers". We'll be adding even more leaderboards next week, so stay tuned.

Other minor updates:
- Profile & Activity: now has a link to directly edit your profile
- New arrivals: colors are reversed to match site color scheme
- Search "go" button works in IE6 now

In an effort to make the Search and Ask process a little smoother and more intuitive, we today released a test version of a new search function. To turn it on, just go to the homepage and choose "Turn on Beta Search" - then, whenever you use the search box at the top to Search or Ask a Question, you'll be using the Beta Search. We'd love to know what you guys think and if you find any problems with it, so please let us know here or through Feedback if you have thoughts you'd like to share.

Also in this release:
- The Feedback module is back on third-person profiles, but minimized by default.
- We had sporadic reports of the "submit" button not working when posting an answer. This should be fixed.

Be they diligent seekers or unmotivated sloths, lots of people use Answerbag for homework help. But what should the Answerbag policy on homework questions be? In the parlance of some of those word for word transcriptions of homework questions that some folks post, should we:

a) reject them on sight?
b) create a place in the taxonomy specifically for homework questions?
c) encourage people to post them in the relevant subject category?
d) do something completely different?

We'd love to hear your thoughts!

For all you Netvibes and Google homepage users, or anyone who's looking for a cool customizable homepage, we've created a new widget for you! The widget lets you search, see latest Q&A, see your mini-Answerbag profile with your latest Q&A, and more. If you don't use Google or Netvibes, please be patient - we'll be making this widget available in other formats soon!

Check them out:

Ever noticed how easy it is to level up in your early days on Answerbag, and how hard it is once you're more senior on the site? There was a lot of excitement when people first started passing Level 60, but as you may have noticed, it's *very* hard to level up past that point.

So, starting today, we're going to level out the points, so to speak. It will be harder to level up in the early stages, so new people won't be going up to Level 10 in a day, but it will be less insane to level up in the Level 60+ range than it is now.

What does this mean for me, you ask? First off, no one will drop a level, so don't worry about that. However, if you're in the Level 30-60 range, it's probably going to take you a lot more points to reach the next level, but once you reach that next level, the level after will be much easier. It's a little tricky to explain the math behind it, so for now, trust me.

All in all, we feel the new Points & Levels scale will be more consistent than the current one, and it'll make new users have to really try to build up points in order to Level up. No more free levels!

The past week has been a bit of a blur, but here's what we've been working on:

• New search functionality: you may now search for Q&A from a specific user!
  Try searching: user:ab-joel answerbag
  This will find all questions that I have submitted that include the word "Answerbag". We'll add search boxes in your profile later, but we thought you'd like to know that this ability is already available. Enjoy!
  
• Animated avatars work in your Profile module at the top right, various other avatar fixes
  
• Comments light should no longer be coming on for no apparent reason- Comments now show the date and time they were left
  
• Answer notifications being sent more quickly
  
• "Last question answered" link works again
  
• Homepage link to "see more new questions" links to Page 2, so they are actually more new questions

Expect more updates on Thursday!

As you may have noticed, we released a new set of bugfixes today! Primarily we were cleaning up some odds & ends as well as improving the site speed. Here are the highlights:

Tiny avatars
We're shrinking all avatars now because we found that sometimes you would have to download 200-400k worth of avatars for a single page, more than doubling the download size of the page itself. The worst culprits are those animated avatars which, while cool, tend to be huge and don't compress well, so these will now only show the full animation when viewed on your profile page. When browsing Q&A, only the first frame of the animation will display. Also, we now store mini versions of the avatars so, for instance, the little avatars next to comments are less than 1k and take virtually no time to download - a huge improvement over the original 10k-100k animated avatars. I'm already seeing pages that are 10% to 20% of their original "size" (translates directly to download time), so we're pretty happy with that!

Experts: it's hard now!
Many of you have asked "Why am I an expert in this or that?", and it was because you had answered one question in an obscure category, so you were the most authoritative person in that category, even if you really didn't contribute much. So, we've now tightened the requirements for who qualifies as an "Expert" so it's more meaningful - it now requires that you answer several questions, receive a higher number of points, and maintain a higher positive percentage of ratings within the category. We think you'll agree that the new "Experts" are more reflective of people who have shown real expertise in their respective subjects.

Search Swap
"Search for answers" and "Ask a question" are now swapped. We find that often times a search on a couple of keywords will result in finding better results than when you ask a complete question, so we're promoting search more strongly. Hopefully this will reduce duplicates as well.

Also:
- On your profile, answers that have been rejected no longer show in "my feedback"
- Duplicate questions popup: reduced number of results to 25
- Image uploading: popup "true" message now gone
- Various server performance upgrades

As always, feedback is welcome!