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 question
11 - 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I’m not finding a dirt-simple per-author comment rss solution in WordPress, but I’d like to get that going eventually too.

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.

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?

That’s how we roll here, dg.

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.

Also, maybe an occasional yea-or-nay web poll for a pending question.

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.

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?

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.

I’d like to build a more comprehensive “Recent Activity” view for the site, on a separate page, but this is a start.

You make a compelling argument.

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.

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.

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?

As I said on MeTa, I also think an opener questions policy would excite more interesting conversations.

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.

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.

That’s all I got…love the site!

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 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.

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.