Askville Blog

Announcing the Good Neighbor Policy

Today we are excited to launch the Askville Good Neighbor Policy. Have you ever wondered how the Askville Terms of Service impact your contributions to Askville? Wonder no more! The Good Neighbor Policy is a distilled, half-page document that gives you guidance on how to contribute content to Askville. 

Over the past 3 years, the Askville Team has heard from the community that consistent moderation is one of the top features they would like to see. 
 
The strategy we are implementing for site moderation is as follows:

1. Posting the Good Neighbor Policy to give easy to follow guidelines for the community
2. Continued presence of a site moderator on Askville enforcing the Good Neighbor Policy
3. Four strikes you’re out. Anyone who violates the Askville Good Neighbor Policy will either be given a warning or a strike. If you get four strikes in any 90 day period your account will be permanently disabled.

In order to help the community become familiar with the rules, the Askville Moderator will give out warnings for most violations over the next 30 days. Only egregious violations will be given a strike. After 30 days the Askville Moderator will enforce the Good Neighbor Policy as is.

Enjoy your day on Askville.

The Askville Team

New Askville Achievements!

Hey Askvillers!

We're really excited to introduce five new achievement awards on Askville! 

The Inquisitive award is given to Askvillers who ask good questions - questions that generate answers from other users.

The Informative award is given to those who give good answers that earn four or more stars.

The Acclaimed award goes to those who have been well complimented on their work.

The Fans award is for our popular users who have earned a loyal following.

And, a new Advanced Challenge award allows newbies who have completed the existing Orientation Award to further explore the features of Askville.

Most of the achievements have multiple levels available - starting from bronze and going on to silver, gold and beyond!

All your existing Askville activity counts towards these achievements, so you may find that you already have some of them granted to you.

Your awards are shown wherever your profile is displayed. Also, when you click on anyone's avatar, a new "mini profile card" will pop up to display that person's achievements. You can even customize the order in which your achievements are displayed. To learn more, visit the Achievements page.

We hope to introduce more achievements in future, but in the meantime, we hope that you'll give us feedback privately or on this feature's release notes forum.

- The Askville Team

Three nice new features

Hey Askville!

For a while now, we've been watching our feedback box (it's at the bottom of every page, where it says "Give us feedback"), and we're pleased to announce that we've implemented three of the most-requested new features.

First off, we've added the ability to delete all of your inbox messages at once. Now you don't need to painstakingly remove every last message by hand.

Now that getting rid of your old mail is no problem, how about you go and unblock a few of your overly-communicative friends? It's now possible to quickly and easily unblock your fellow Askvillers. To see the list of users you've blocked, head over to My Askville, click on the "Settings" link, and click on the "Privacy" tab.

 

Just click "unblock" to let those users resume sending you inbox messages and compliments.  Don't worry, you can reblock them later if they abuse their new speaking privileges!

Finally, we've saved the best for last. Have you ever wanted to get to another users' profile page, but you couldn't find a link? Now all you need to do is type their name into the search bar, and it should pop right up.  You don't need to remember their whole name, just type as much as you know. If you don't see your friend, click "More People" for a list of everybody whose nickname matches your search.

We hope you like these new features, and we look forward to hearing about what you'd like us to do next!

Cheers,
The Askville Development Team

Askville is Hiring!

We're looking for strong software developers to join our team in Seattle!  Interested? Send in your resume to askville-jobs@amazon.com.

Job Description :

Amazon's New Products Group (owner of the social question and answer website Askville) is looking for rock-star software development engineers to join our team.

Since launching Askville a few short years ago, we have built a thriving community of dedicated users, and built a large and important business.  We are an independent, dedicated group of developers who love working in a fast paced startup-like environment.  We have a passion for developing the best Web 2.0 user experience possible, and for using the right tools to get the job done quickly, and with the highest possible quality.

We are looking for smart, driven engineers who are passionate about designing great software and great user experience, who want to solve challenging problems, and help others solve theirs.  The candidate will be responsible for helping to create innovative and good user experiences on the web building both client-side and server-side technology.  The candidate should have experience in designing and programming scalable, high availability systems involving huge data sets. The candidate should also be highly skilled in the art of indexing databases, schema design, performance tuning, database replication techniques, query optimization and handling database complexity. The candidate should also have strong experience in coding algorithms and data structures that produces superior performance.  We have built a great foundation and we are looking for someone to¬ come help us design and build the next generations, and work with us to take our business to the next level.

Job Qualifications
  - Bachelor's degree in computer science or related degree, or equivalent experience
  - Excellent OO design and coding skills in Java
  - Experience in Struts, Spring, JSP, JSF, Hibernate, Tomcat, JPA, etc.
  - Experience in developing efficient AJAX interfaces with in-depth knowledge of available AJAX libraries and frameworks
  - Experience in HTML, JavaScript, CSS and general Web 2.0 techniques
  - Preferably, familiarity with scripting languages like PHP and Ruby
  - Strong focus on the end-user
  - Team player with excellent communication skills

Bonus Question Update

We are introducing changes to address some of the community's concerns regarding Bonus Questions.
 
We recognize that bonus questions are not for everyone. Bonus questions are helpful to the Askville business and do aim to provide valuable information on a variety of topics. However, many of you are not interested in bonus questions and would prefer not to see them on the site. We understand your desires and would like to find ways to facilitate them while still keeping bonus questions around for those who find them valuable.
 
To help balance those needs, we will be changing how bonus questions impact the community. Later this week, we will no longer pay quest gold and experience points for answers to bonus questions. This also means that the Askviller-of-the-Day and the weekly leader boards will no longer consider answers to bonus questions. This should restore some credibility and fun to those elements of the site – as the only users who show up there are those who have done a good job of answering community questions.
 
Also, by default, we won’t show bonus questions in search results. (You do have an option to add them back to your search results if you wish.) Bonus questions will also not be shown at the bottom of every answer page.
 
We hope these changes will improve your experience of finding,  discussing and answering community questions.
 
As always, please provide us with feedback privately or on this discussion board. We will continue to listen and work hard to improve the site.
 
Thank you!
 
The Askville Team.

Changes

Hey Askvillers,

It all started with a wacky idea for a website. Joseph Park, Fai Leong, and myself sat around kicking around ideas, and what we came up with was the very first version of Askville. It's been three years since then, and Askville has grown from a small operation of a handful of employees to a profitable business with millions of visitors operated by a full team of software developers. Sadly, today we must announce that two of those founding members, Joseph Park, better known as the AskvilleMayor, and Fai Leong have departed from Askville.com. Askville is now in the hands of myself, Christian Cabanero (ChristianC), along with the Askville development team.

Happily, a new hand at the helm means that Askville is going to be going through some changes, and in that vein I have some exciting news. As my first official act, I am pleased to announce that the voting curtain, a.k.a. the red curtain, is no more!

The purpose of the red curtain was to try promoting fairness, which was a laudable goal. However, after analyzing the impact that it had on users, I realized that it forced the community into anonymity and hurt the social aspect of the Askville experience. In my opinion, Askville should be first and foremost an online community of friendly people helping each other out by answering questions, and seeing each other’s names and faces is an integral part of community.

We at Askville wish Joe and Fai much success in their future endeavors, and I along with the development team look forward to working on Askville.com for a long time to come.       

-Christian Cabanero (ChristianC)

Happy 4th of July!

Hey Askvillers!
 
It's been a while since our last update so we thought that this is a good time to let everybody know what's been going on.
 
We've been working hard over the last few months to figure out how to improve the Askville experience for everybody. The new Askville awards that were introduced in April have been a hit for many users, so we're currently creating many new awards that will make the the Askville experience even more fun and rewarding. We're also looking at improving the user experience in some other areas beyond awards. So rest assured that we haven't left town! On the contrary, we're very excited about some of the cool new features that we intend to roll out in the coming weeks and months.
 
So have a good 4th of July weekend, everybody, and thank you for helping to make Askville a fun place to be!
 
The Askville Team

Askville Awards

Hey Askville,

Some of you may have noticed that we launched a new feature recently called Askville Awards.  This includes two initial awards with more awards currently in development. Eventually we want to have a large collection of fun awards.  Some will be easier to earn, while others will be incredibly hard to earn.

The awards will show up on your My Askville page and your Public Profile and look like this:

The first award is what we call the Veteran Award which displays the number of years you've been on Askville.  For example, if you've been on Askville for at least 1 year you'll earn the 1 year at askville award.  There is also a 2 years at askville, and a 3 years at askville award which is yet to been earned. 

The second award is the Orientation Challenge Award which is awarded to anyone who completes the Askville Orientation Challenge.  This first challenge is geared toward newer members to help them get familiar with Askville.   When a new members signs up for an Askville account, they see this in their My Askville page:

In order for anyone to earn the Orientation Challenge Award they will have to complete the 5 steps listed above.

Existing members can also earn the Orientation Challenge Award.  Existing members will see the following message on their My Askville page:

All of your past activity counts toward earning the award.  If you abstain from the award you can always go back and see the available awards under your Experience box and click on See available awards:

To learn more about Askville Awards visit your My Askville page.

Thanks for the feedback!

We also want to thank everyone for the feedback that we have received.  The whole team appreciated the reception and to see that people really do still care about Askville as much as we do.  Thanks everyone for their feedback.  We especially wanted to thank Paradise.t for helping us find that anonymity bug which has been fixed.

Got an idea for a fun new award?  We'd love to hear about it, share your ideas here:

Askville Awards Discussion Board

Change to Answering Period

Today we've changed the period that a question remains open for answers from 7 days to 3 days.  Once the first person has submitted their answer to a question, anyone else wanting to answer that question will now have 3 days to answer.   Because of this change answers will be revealed to everyone sooner, which includes raising the anonymous voting curtain earlier.  Unfortunately, this does mean that there will be less time available to answer a given question but we did some number crunching and found that the vast majority of answers were completed within 3 days.  You will also receive compliments to your answers sooner, waiting only up to 3 days instead of 7 to get answer compliments.  The rules that govern voting, gaining experience points and quest gold have not changed; the only change is to the answering period now lasting 3 days.

- The Askville Development Team

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Askville & Questville December Update

Over the past few weeks we've been hard at work on implementing ideas from the community and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  Recently we launched features that include keeping you signed in, bonuses for new user questions, improvements to the discussion boards (including better linking of compliments) and major upgrades to the rich text editor.  We've also fixed a whole bunch of bugs that we heard about thanks to your feedback.  We certainly appreciate the time that people have put into providing us feedback.

We're continuing to work on requests for improvements from you, the Askville community.  A few items we're currently working on include bulk delete of inbox and sent messages, the ability to sort the order of your friends and faves (making it easier to keep track of what they're up to on Askville), spell check for discussion boards, and some general performance enhancements and bug fixes. (The best way to provide your feedback is by clicking the "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of any page on Askville.)

Finally, due to the growing needs that we have in supporting Askville, coupled with our limited resources, we have indefinitely postponed Questville until further notice. We apologize for any inconveniences this will cause anyone, but this will allow the team to stay focused on building a great community on Askville.

- The Askville Development Team

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