Big Big Question

The first question went live November 30th, 2007, and we’ve been getting search engine referrer hits about selling kidneys ever since.

229 questions and 2000+ answers later, I’m pleased that y’all have been around to make this place tick.

I’ve talked vaguely about doing some redesign work here in the past; now may be a good time to start thinking about that in earnest, so if you’ve got any brainstorms that have been knocking around (or old ideas that never got implemented), feel free to mention ‘em here.

Because you oughta, by god. Mefi’s own Brandon Blatcher has rolled this thing up from scratch as place for folks to just have at mefi-style political discussion free from the generalist-driven constraints of the mefi front page.

In other words, PoliticalFilter : Mefisphere poli discussion :: Big Big Question : Mefisphere hypothetical chatfilter. I know SAT-style analogies get you excited, so go check it out already.

This message is an unpaid advertisement from The Committee to Promote Interesting New Spinoff Sites. I’m Josh Millard, and I couldn’t really think of a question this morning.

Take spammer Stephen Sanchez, iProfile shill, who (round of applause here) is the first person to try sockpuppet spam on the Big Big Question.

Steve-o posted a (bizarrely practical!) question about resumes and then thoughtfully answered it himself under a different account, couched in a fictional happy discovery of a great new resource blah blah blah etc.

So, here’s the dilemma: Stephen had to have (a) found the site, (b) discerned that it was, indeed, a question-and-answer resource of some sort, and (c) had the wherewithal to bother with a two-account sockpuppet show — all of which are arguments toward having some notion of what you’re on about, at least — and yet the end result was so baldly, embarrassingly obvious that any credit lent above is revoked with prejudice.

While this sort of spam may be new to the BBQ, it’s old hat at mefi and has been running wild on the net for a good long time. So there’s a culture for it to fester in — one of naivety or indifference or even encouragement in some places. In that case, rather than raw stupidity being to blame, is it that this unchallenging environment has made otherwise bright, attentitive stars of the die-in-a-fire spam-and-shill sector lazy?

I’m also willing to accept “all of the above” as an answer.

Taking a break from questions this morning — it feels like about time for a How Y’all Doin’ post. So? How, exactly?

Wait, those are questions. Dammit.

So, fun facts: we’ve just hit 1,500 comments. Zounds! And 132 questions so far. Which is not a round number but I’m still pretty okay with.

Also, those Mets: how about them?

Been pretty quiet around the BBQ this week. How the heck are you, anyway? What’re you up to, lately?

I’ve been running BBQ as (with a couple exceptions) a one-big-question-a-day venture, including weekends.  We’ve seen a pretty interesting variety of responsiveness to different topics and different types of questions, which is great.  But I’m wondering if Saturday and Sunday are good days or not so good days to drop new questions.

Does it make more sense to take the weekend off, as it were — let Friday’s question stand until Monday?  Or one question for the whole weekend, posted Saturday morning and standing through Sunday night?

Do folks want real thinkers on the weekend, or something lighter and chattier, down-time fare?

And, aside from that, how y’all doing?

It’s been a week since the last What Do You Want To See post, and I’d like to talk about (a) what’s new/changed, and (b) what else could happen.

1. Profile pages! If someone comments while logged in, clicking on their name in the byline of that comment will now take you to their profile page, rather than their listed URL (which is displayed on the profile page instead). Here’s mine.

It needs some linking-up that’ll I’ll do in the next few days; right now, the only way to get there is to click on a comment byline or go to http://bigbigquestion.com/author/username/ or http://bigbigquestion.com/?author=userid which (just redirects to the username version).

The fields listed on the page are based on what you’ve filled out in the Wordpress Profile form, which you can access from this link if you’re logged in.

Having said all that: what else would you like to see, or what would you like to see different, etc, on the profile pages?

2. Fave/vote experiments! I’ve been playing with a couple different voting widgets, in hopes of finding a good fit for post-voting and favorite/bookmarking functionality. As of right now, every comment has a little AJAXy green thumbs-up button on it; click on it and you should see the button go grey and the count go up.

There’s also a per-post voting widget; in fact, here it is now:

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It should work similarly. This latter widget is more useful under the hood than the comment-voting widget — it tracks activity by username rather than IP — but I’m likely to cannibalize one or both and just build a unified version from scratch to handle our voting/faving/bookmarking needs; following on that, I’d hope to include clickable records on user profiles pages and have lists of Good Stuff.

Per-post voting would also be very useful for…

3. User Questions! I’ve set up a two things, both of which are still in progress:

- Post a New Question page

- See All Questions page

If you’re logged in, you should be able to post a new question just by filling out the title and content fields and hitting post. There’s even a preview button. Hot.

The all-questions page lists every question posted, in chronological order, with the question title, user, categories, and number of comments. However, a question will not appear on the front page of Big Big Question without some magical admin approval; how to manage that process elegantly in the future is an open question, but that’s one of the places where the voting/favorite system could be fun and handy.

A couple of big notes on this:

- There is currently no mechanism to limit posts. I’ll put one in place at some point soon, but for now I’ll simply ask that you show some restraint and not go postin’ crazy.

- Pretty much all of this is duct-tape patchwork; if you find something broken, please let me know so we can get it fixed instead of bringing the dang site down.

4. TODO/Open Questions?

There’s a bunch of things — some mentioned explicitly above — that need/want doing. If you have any specific requests or suggestions or brainstorms or dire predictions, bring ‘em on.

On big thing: the all-questions page needs it’s own name, I think. It’s the open-conversation, askme-ish counterpart to the One A Day experience of the front page of BBQ. My favorite suggestion so far: “The Kitchen”, evoking that universal point of congregation at any house party.

So! Have at it! Try not to break anything.

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?