Something that annoys me is seeing recent comments without reference. If I were new user coming here, I’d want to see the topic in question above the most recent comment.

The future value of point number one is only members could post questions and number two only members could propose questions that would make it to the front page.

Anyone can read, anyone can answer (with moderation if it gets too nasty or snarky) but only “members” can post in the user forum and only “great” questions from members make the front page.

Thus having a Front Page and then a separate Kitchen (whatever) linkable from the home page.

You can keep the model of anonymous user posted questions as in AskMe but then you are losing membership. I say if someone wants to ask, they should sign up. Then if you ever want to turn this into a business model, you have a bigger user base.

Just my two cents.

It’s possible; I’m kind of curious to see how things will proceed once I’ve got everything in place and there’s (hopefully) a little more daily traffic and participation. And I’m hoping the user-questions area will be a fun draw for exactly that increased activity.

My take on the front page is that it should be kind of a one-stop, Main Event type thing for folks who are less inclined to go looking through all the questions stewing in the open area; if someone comes to the site and never really looks around, they can still have a good, fun read checking out the day’s featured question.

Whether the pull-from-the-back model will really click in the long-run, I don’t know. But I can imagine two or five or ten questions getting posted a day by users, and some healthy regular-readers-and-commenters traffic on those, but the one thrown up on the front page kind of getting the deluxe, higher-traffic treatment.

Anonymous posters currently lack the option to follow up their original posts.

krautland, are you talking about Big Big Question or about AskMe? I’m really just talking about this site.

What I am not getting?

And also that I should start previewing.

Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m hoping to do with the Kitchen (or Backyard or whatever I end up calling it). Let folks post their own questions (go on! Try it!) and polish the list-view and voting mechanism enough to make it easy to pick out the best ones.

Part of that will be getting some visibility for that queue onto the front page, something I may try to figure out today.

Also, this seems like a nice place to point out that the voting tool on comments works sporadically. I tried to vote on MMD’s suggestion of “The Backyard” and received the magic-eight-ball-esque reply, “Error: try again later.” I did as it asked, tried again later, and received the quite humorous and still somewhat magic-eight-ball-esque reply, “Karma not changed. Please try again later.” My karma needs fixing, dammit!

For the moment, open-ended; I hope people will kind of continue to stake out and explore the stuff within the spirit of the Big Question, What If ethos that I’ve seen in the submissions so far (which is what most of the front page has consisted of, at this point), but it’s so early that I imagine we’ll get a sense of what does and doesn’t work from direct experience.

So guidelines to come, but for now just ask what you feel like asking.

Very cool so far, thanks!

Are there going to be any guidelines for posting questions or open-ended right now?

Just sayin’.