Sun 2 Dec 2007
So the site exists; we’ve got questions and answers, and it’s been an entertaining couple of days already. But what else would you like to see to make Big Big Question a better experience? What do you see as immediately useful, and what do you reckon will start to be handy a month or so down the line?
Go nuts!
Update: Here’s a test of a simple +vote type rating thing for posts!
(8 votes)
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How cool is that?
Posted by Josh Millard45 answers so far!
RSS feeds for each individual question, so we can see when new answers go up on older questions.
I answered this already on MetaTalk, but I’d like to see a forum in which people can post their own questions and get answers.
I’m not going to spend the time crafting a question, only to submit it and HOPE that it gets posted.
I do like the question-a-day thing. I suggest keeping that AND having a forum for additional questions, much as they do on The Straight Dope site.
A favourites system? That, and is there anway to make the font smaller/expand the column … or get rid of the column altogether and let individual browsers do the word wrapping a la Metafilter? The narrowness is rather jarring >.>
A The Straight Dope or Digg system. And a liquid layout for the comments.
I agree completely with grumblebee. Is the fear that too many posts would be going if everything were approved? I also don’t like the way the site make it appear as though TODAY you must CONCENTRATE on THIS FRONT-PAGE QUESTION. [All caps to indicate sonority, not yelling, by the way].
I guess overall, I’d just make it like a combination of mefi and metachat, but with hypothetical stuff and none of the stupid shouting threads and celebrity gossip.
Um… more then one question a day?
Oh yeah, I agree with other people that we should be able to post our own questions directly, and a digg system would be cool as well.
Also, categories or tags or some way to find questions that might not be broadly popular, but might appeal to individual readers. Right now, we probably don’t have too many questions, but that might change at some point.
I love that the comments are numbered, but a favoriting system would make my cake. From an aesthetics perspective, I find it really disharmonious that each element is different in regards to centering, left, or right justification…it makes the page look really messy. I think a lot of that could be solved however if the “Big Big Question” were left justified, and the actual question were left justified as well (instead of clumsily wrapped around the date block…maybe move the date block above it, left justified?). The Big Big Question headline and the question itself should align and have some feature commonality (that part is done nicely already), since they are the crux of the site. Of course, that leaves the “Logged in as” line hanging, but maybe that can either move down or up to hug the sidebar or topbar.
That’s all I got…love the site!
I’m sure(or rather, hope) that questions will open up in time; the thing that bugs me most right now is the site formatting. Coming here straight from Mefi is like going from a ballroom to a closet. Otherwise, I think that this could be something really good.
“Recent comments” is useless in the format, since the 5 most recent are pretty much guaranteed to be in the current question.
Definitely go to a liquid layout. This is hard to read.
I would like more questions per day and a way to surf easily to questions with recent posts that isn’t strictly a list of the recent comments. Perhaps the 15 questions with most recent comments?
Public profiles, surfable via clicking on usernames.
Question tags. It would be awesome if people could add tags to their question replies that added to the tags for the question. This is something I’ve wanted to be implemented on a number of sites.
Is membership restricted in some way, or is it totally open door?
If it’s the latter, then I’m not super-excited over opening up the ability for anyone to post questions, to appear in real time. Call me a cynic for assuming the worst of the masses, but I suspect it wouldn’t be long before “How is babby formed?” and “Britney Spears is still totally hawt, amirite?”
“Make it more like MetaFilter” means that there has to be a filter somewhere. I don’t see where open question posting addresses that.
There’s still a mod, and not everyone knows or will be interested in joining the site, though. Even before MeFi had a $5 cover, there was something of a self-filtering mechanism just because of who was interested in being involved…
As I said on MeTa, I also think an opener questions policy would excite more interesting conversations.
Keep it coming, folks.
So I’m hearing a few big things, for sure:
- Either a visible question queue or (more desirable?) a non-front-page place for folks to freely post their own questions for others to answer and thumbs-up, with promotion-to-the-front page as a bonus for the best ones.
This seems like the fundamental open-things-up request. It’s a good one. I’ve got a few ideas of how to manage it; the simplest, architecturally, would be to promote y’all from “subscriber” (you can comment, you can update your profile) to some higher intermediate WordPress level, so that you can make your own posts as well; and then create a view to Everybody’s Posts.
I’ll ponder the heck out of it.
- Wider/liquid layout to the site.
Good idea. I ran with an existing WP theme to get this set up—and I have an arbitrary fondness for narrow-ish fixed-width layouts—but with text as our content, a bit more flexibility to the display seems like a good plan.
- Allow categories and tagging
Absolutely. Actually, the questions so far have all been given one or two category tags already, but I don’t have ‘em displaying yet. As the site’s pool of questions grow, it’s definitely something to make visible and community-appendable.
- User profile pages
In progress!
- Per-question RSS feeds
Great idea. And probably pretty easy to swing; I’d bet that it’s lurking in WP already and I just need to add a rss link tag to the question view.
- Favorites
Question, on that: are folks thinking they’d like mefi-like favorites where you’d be able to find the things you’ve favorited, specifically, or is this more a request in general for the digg/[this is good] notion of promoting questions/comments for general consumption?
A couple more:
Is membership restricted in some way, or is it totally open door?
Totally open door, for the foreseeable future. A couple things on that, though:
1. As mdn says, we’ve got me eyeing everything pretty attentively, so there’s not a big worry about the Yahoo! Answers crowd storming the place. If someone can’t get how the site is supposed to work or respect the general guidelines or the “What If” spirit of things, I’m comfortable working with them or just inviting them to leave.
2. The crowd for now is really self-selecting; I don’t know if we’ve had anyone sign up who isn’t a mefite or a metachat member or a faithful reader of one or both. I’d expect (hope, even) that we’ll see interesting and interested people come in from all over the place outside the mefisphere in the long run, but for now I don’t think we have to worry about it too much.
“Recent comments” is useless in the format, since the 5 most recent are pretty much guaranteed to be in the current question.
Agreed. It’s a stock widget, and it might hypothetically function well in a year or so, right now it’s silly. I’m hoping to tweak that on the short term to be more useful.
I think it would be cool if, for every answer I post that Josh likes, he comes to wherever I am and gives me a light (non sexual!) neck rub and shoulder massage.
Maybe distance / travel time would make this idea difficult to implement? If so, perhaps I could accumulate points, with say 10 massages = 1 plo chop and 10 plo chops = 1 analingus session (non-sexual!) that I could cash in at my convenience when I am in his area.
The benefit here would be that I would be more motivated to post things that Josh likes. The drawback is that at some future time he would be forced to rim me.
Should we ban Meatbomb on general principle?
You make a compelling argument.
I’m experimenting with a Recent Comments plugin that seems like an improvement over the stock WP widget; right now it’s displaying the most recent single comment from each thread, which seems like it’ll be a decent way to keep visibility on late answers to older threads, since the current thread won’t take over the whole list so much as likely just hold the top position.
I’d like to build a more comprehensive “Recent Activity” view for the site, on a separate page, but this is a start.
I’d like favourites (perhaps a different name? The name taken from Internet Explorer always irked me. Bookmarks is better, because sometime I want to keep track of things that I don’t necessarily like) to be of both replies and of questions.
Also, a preview button on these comments would be great.
Geezups…using italics and blockquotes looks horrid.
Wow, the default blockquote css was horrid. Font-size: 1.6em? Yow. Fixed.
More than one question per day would be cool. Quit that amateur-hour “other” gig if necessary to free up some time.
Favourites as in bookmarks, I guess. IIRC the pony request for a way to mark “this is good” in a thread has always been shot down at MeTa..
Favourites as in bookmarks, I guess. IIRC the pony request for a way to mark “this is good” in a thread has always been shot down at MeTa..
Without merit, in my opinion. The tool is used both for bookmarking and for applause over there — but because no one wants to acknowledge that MeFites would do anything as bourgeois as applauding posts and comments, we have to have the two commingled. I don’t see any reason Josh should be compelled to continue it here, if he wants to and he can find an easy way to separate the two.
I’d love to see a way to give questions/answers a Digg-style thumbs-up (maybe similar to the Projects voting?), and also come back to pieces I’ve marked to re-visit later.
Perhaps some CSS wizard could create a Metafilter-like theme for the site? ;-)
Huzzah! Fluid layout!! Many thanks, Josh :D
Ice cream. I would like this site much better if I had some ice cream.
Also, maybe an occasional yea-or-nay web poll for a pending question.
Aye, experimentally, hacky fluid layout now in place. Seems a bit more spacious, though I think it’s begging for a lot of spit and polish at the moment.
Yeah, icecream would be good.
Holy shit, it’s scarily easy to comment here, isn’t it? No preview or anything, no different-looking comment box or anything. just type and click, baby, type and click.
just type and click, baby, type and click
That’s how we roll here, dg.
I’d like favorites just for the ability to tell someone “that answer rocked/was funny”. Sure, they could be MeFi style bookmarks, but that’s not the way I use them at MeFi, so I wouldn’t use that aspect of them here. I would just like to give some positive feedback to people who make great comments, without clogging the thread with “That was awesome, UserX!” comments.
Little tiny thing:
On the right sidebar, the first box says:
A question gets posted each day. You smart folks answer.
- Why Big Big Question?
- Suggest a new question
- Read the FAQ
- Register or log in
That last line shows up even if you’re logged in, which confused me, because I thought it meant it had logged me out. Is there a way to get it to say “Register or log in” only when you’re not logged in, and “Log out” when you are logged in?
Hey, look! A preview function! Celebrate!
That last line shows up even if you’re logged in, which confused me, because I thought it meant it had logged me out. Is there a way to get it to say “Register or log in” only when you’re not logged in, and “Log out” when you are logged in?
Ooh, good point. I just need to throw a login check around that. Will fix.
Per-thread RSS feeds are now linked just after the post title, for easy subscribin’.
I’m not finding a dirt-simple per-author comment rss solution in WordPress, but I’d like to get that going eventually too.
This is a test of the logged-out comment tagging.
Hey, that works.
Rudimentary profiles are a go; comments left by logged-in users will now link to profile pages instead of the optional user-website field (which is itself listed on the profile page). Users who are not logged in get no link—I think I may nix guest-poster username links on general anti-spam principle.
I like the “(guest)” notifier to make it clearer who is and isn’t registered; yea or nay?
It’s looking good. And I like the (guest) thingie. Makes them easy targets.
I like the (guest) indicator, and second pineapple’s I’d love to see a way to give questions/answers a Digg-style thumbs-up (maybe similar to the Projects voting?), and also come back to pieces I’ve marked to re-visit later.
A forum style approach might be more effective for handling user questions, and with a user ranking system in place, could prevent most of the “How is babby formed?” stuff by requiring minimum participation time, reputation points (mod- or community-assigned), or minimum post count before starting new threads. You could run a “featured question” and top n most recent posts on the front page pretty easily.
It would be nice if the recent questions box linked to the Archives. Also maybe make it last 7 questions, so it’s a full week.
Expanded the Recent Posts box to a week, smackfu — it’s exciting getting to the point where there’s enough content to cause problems.
Tagging an archives link into the box itself is a good idea, but for now I just butted the archives widget up below.
The preview button seems to not work…on the front page. Seems solid in individual threads. Obviously I’ve got some tweaking to do, there.
A couple of fave/voting things being played with. Not sure I really want “downvoting” as a feature, so I’m going to aim for a [+] model along with some semantically different [there is a problem with this] thing for bad stuff, rather than just a running tally of +/- votes.
So, Josh, can we cash these votes in for anything? Hmm?
At the moment, they’re good for approximately squat. I’m not sold on the particular implementation I’m playing with—it doesn’t associate votes with the voting user, so there’s no in-built way to have a “my favorites” sort of view; and it checks for have-voted status against IP rather than username, which is silly, since I intend to make it a registered-users-only feature anyway.
So the short of it is that I’ll probably tear this out and replace it with something else in the long run; but for now I’m trying to get my head around what I want that Long Run solution to be.
The archive link is perfect! I know it’s at the top of the page, but that was the last place I looked for it… weird me.
Heh. I’m a real menu-driven person, so I tend to rely overly on the Things At The Top Of The Page view of site layout. Bit of a design blindspot, so, yeah, thanks for suggesting the addition.
I really like the shiny low usernumber, for what it’s worth :3
Webstats fun:
So pretty much nothing on the internet except for metatalk and metachat and google knows about the site yet—which makes sense, given the mefi-centric crowd and that metatalk posts don’t really catch wind, memetically—so there’s very little to see in the referrer logs. Metatalk, metachat, a couple of blogs, some feed readers, and a touch of spam to top it all off.
The search engine breakdown is kind of fun, though. This is the queries bringing people to the site, with number of queries to the left:
23 - big big question11 - bigbigquestion
2 - abc
1 - big big question millard
1 - value of donated body parts
1 - big question metafilter
1 - the big big question
1 - what's your worth on the body parts market
1 - big big qestion
1 - big questions
I wonder on the one hand how many of these are readers/mefites who like to navigate by google (I’m guessing “big big question millard” isn’t from a stranger) and how many are people who just wanted to know what kind of large, large interrogatives could be found at random.
I also wonder about the “body parts” searches. Heh.