Askville Blog

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

Visit Askville   

Earn Extra Gold by Helping Newbies

Hey Askville,

As some of you may have noticed, we recently launched a new feature called the "Newbie Question Box". Answering any questions you see in this box will reward you in two ways: firstly, you get to help a new Askviller have a great experience and secondly, you will automatically get a 2x coin multiplier applied to your answer!

To check out this feature, first make sure you're signed in to Askville and then click on the "see more" link found near the bottom of the home page:

Here's what the box looks like, at the top of the page:

We hope you like this feature, and please don't hesitate to send us feedback!

Sincerely,
The Askville Team

Go to the Askville Homepage

Community Guideline Improvements

Hey Askville,

Based on the great feedback and discussions we've heard, we wanted to share with you some of the changes we will be making going forward with our community guidelines.  At the end of the day, we all have a shared goal to make Askville a friendlier place where people can have meaningful relationships in a safe environment based on intelligent interchange of ideas.  After looking at the discussion it’s clear that we need clearer guidelines, better enforcement, more involvement from the staff and more accountability for people’s actions.

The following is a summary of A) Concrete actions we will be taking and B) Concerns that were voiced by the community that we are still investigating.

CONCRETE ACTIONS WE ARE TAKING:

Harassment
It’s clear that everyone is concerned about issues with harassment and that there have been many forms of harassment taking place using everything from questions to discussion boards to personal messages. 

Based on people’s feedback, especially the concern that harassment is continuing in an endless cycle, we are instituting a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of behavior that demonstrates intent to harass an individual.  This policy will be strictly enforced.  The consequences will be a temporary suspension of a user's account, which will also count against the 4-strike and your out policy, where after the 4th strike, the account will be permanently banned.

Many of you have stated that we should not ignore infractions that have happened in the past.  As a result we are suspending the accounts of 17 individuals based on a review of their past behavior (this list may increase as we continue our investigation).  It is clear that these individuals all engaged in activities with intent to harass an individual or individual(s) in the past.  These members will have their accounts suspended for 7 days effective by end of day today and they will be assessed 3 strikes against their accounts (i.e., after the temporary suspension, if the user continues to harass others, their account will be permanently banned).

Increased Transparency and Accountability
In addition, to support the transparency that people have asked for, by the end of today, if any account has been suspended or banned, their avatars will change to signal that they are currently being suspended or have been banned. 

Fairer Voting and Reduce Gaming
Later this week, we will be rolling out a feature where the answerer's identity will be hidden/anonymous during both the voting period and appeal process.  We believe this should help reduce voting abuse, collusion, and favoritism that is going on in Askville.  As stated in our previous blog entry, we have already cracked down on voting abuse/collusion and will continue to do so.

Multiple Accounts
We already have safeguards in place to prevent users from easily creating multiple accounts.  We have investigated several allegations already and in a vast majority of cases we have discovered that users do not have multiple accounts, but rather they are just friends.  That said, our safeguards are not full proof.  We will be adding additional measures that will help us further detect users who have created multiple accounts.  Once we identify users with multiple accounts, we will ban both accounts, per our community guidelines.

Consistent Enforcement
It was very clear from the feedback that we, the Askville staff, need to do a much better job at consistent enforcement.  We’ve begun focusing more effort on monitoring abuse reports and are working to improve our internal systems for tracking abuse feedback so that we can respond to issues in a more timely fashion.  Having a dedicated Community Manager will have a major impact on this front.  Moreover, we will also be working to make the abuse-reporting system more user-friendly.  We’re especially concerned about areas where abuse is happening, for example in the personal messaging area.

UPCOMING FEATURES RELATED TO COMMUNITY GUIDELINES:

Better Transparency
In the forum there was a clear desire for more transparency of people’s behavior as this creates the foundation of trust and accountability on the site.  The fact that there’s already a good amount of transparency on the site has proven to be an asset to the community.  As a start, we will start working on improving transparency by making suppressed content more transparent by displaying who the person was that created the inappropriate content.   

Ignore A User
To support better self-defense and self-policing we will start investigating ways to build a robust “ignore feature” that will help people better protect themselves from other members when necessary.  This will likely take a considerable amount of work and so in the meantime we would ask that people still rely on the report-abuse system.

OTHER CONCERNS STILL BEING DISCUSSED
People have also voiced some very valid concerns that we share and will be investigating further actions we can take.  Those include:

1) More involvement between the Askville Staff and the community. 

2) More consistent enforcement of Terms of Service.

3) More timely dealing with troll behavior and abusive content

4) Make newbies feel more welcomed to Askville

5) A long list of feature improvements.

We will continue to discuss publicly and privately how we can further improve the aforementioned concerns.  Every community will have its growing pains, and we realize we are currently going through one right now.  We hope that these actions will improve Askville and make it a safer and friendlier place to visit every day for both old veterans as well as newbies.  To be clear, we haven't made any changes to our terms of service, we are just enforcing them more sternly and reducing the amount of "gray" area with the hopes that it will result in a friendlier Askville.  For everyone's benefit, below are links to our Terms of Service as well as blog entries related to our community guidelines:

http://askville.amazon.com/termsofservice.html

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2007/05/clarifying-comm.html

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2007/06/recent-activity.html (last point of blog entry)

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2007/07/politcs-relig-1.html

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2008/03/what-would-you.html 

For those interested in our blog entry about Bonus Questions that was posted earlier today, please click on link below:

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2008/08/bonus-questions.html

One final note: Although we love Askville dearly and would do it voluntarily as all of you do every day, we also need to generate profits for Amazon.  Askville's business model is tied to generating revenues based on the content that is created on this site.  Content includes questions, answers, discussion posts, and even bonus questions.  We will try our best to keep a balance between maintaining a healthy community while also generating profits for Amazon. 

Sincerely,
AskvilleMayor

 

Bonus Questions and Voting Abuse Update

Hey Askville,

As many of you know, over a month ago we launched a controversial feature called Bonus Questions in an alpha lab (feature is only available to a select number of Askville users to get their feedback).  Today, I want to clarify what they are, why we have them on Askville, why they are still in alpha lab, and what we plan on doing with them in the future.

What are Bonus Questions and why do we have them on Askville?
There actually are two features tied to Bonus Questions:
A) the Bonus Question Box; and
B) Bonus Questions

A) Bonus Question Box – is currently available to alpha lab users only.  This is an experimental feature (hence, it is still in alpha lab) that we launched over a month ago.  The original concept of the Bonus Question Box is to give each user questions that we wanted to highlight based on a user’s interests, recent activity, preferences, and other factors (e.g. your friend asked a question that is on page 45, we wanted to highlight that question for you).  In effect, the Bonus Question Box would act as a personalization filter for each user.  The more you use Askville, the more relevant the Bonus Question Box would get.  We felt this would help users discover more interesting questions, faster.  However, due to limited resources and re-prioritization of projects, we haven’t been able to implement the personalization features for the Bonus Question Box (we hope to do this in the coming months), which is why it is still in  alpha lab.

B) Bonus Questions – Absent the personalization features for the Bonus Question Box, we wanted to create other types of questions that could potentially be interesting for Askville members to answer.  Many newbies (as well as many veteran Askvillers) who stumble upon Askville have difficulty finding a question to answer, making their first experience on Askville a frustrating one.  Moreover, certain types of questions that would be interesting to find answers to (e.g. sports, entertainment news, trivia, etc…) are rarely asked on Askville, but we realize would generate interesting answers by our community.  Consequently, with the help of another Amazon business model (mturk.com), we started to create Bonus Questions (henceforth called mturk Bonus Questions).  Knowing that the quality of questions created by mturk.com would range from good to really bad, we decided that mturk Bonus Questions would originally be only visible via the Bonus Question Box (for alpha lab users to see only) and only those that had at least one answer submitted by the community are the only ones that would be displayed to the rest of the community on all the major question lists on Askville (i.e. roughly 80% of mturk Bonus Questions are hidden).  Our hypothesis was that if someone from the Askville community decided to submit an answer to a mturk Bonus Question, the question most likely would be good enough for other Askville members to see, for better or for worse.  Furthermore, since we knew that we would get some poorly written mturk Bonus Questions, we allowed our community to edit any mturk Bonus Question to improve the quality of the question.  Eventually, there will be other types of Bonus Questions once we have built the personalization features for the Bonus Question Box.  Until then, the only types of Bonus Questions available will be mturk Bonus Questions.

Why are the Bonus Question Box and mturk Bonus Questions still in alpha lab and what are their future plans?
Both features are still a work in progress, which is why they both are considered Alpha Lab features.  That said, mturk Bonus Questions that were answered by at least one Askville member does show up on all the main question lists on Askville.  We realize that there is still a lot of work ahead of us to build the personalization features of the Bonus Question Box and improve the quality of mturk Bonus Questions.  We still believe that once we have implemented personalization on the former and improved the quality of the latter, coupled with adding additional types of Bonus Questions, the Askville experience will improve dramatically.  In the interim, we kindly ask for everyone’s patience as we continue to make strides in both features. 

Are there any guidelines with respect to Bonus Questions and editing mturk Bonus Questions in particular?
So long as the edited mturk Bonus Questions are related to the same topics that were originally submitted, users are able to make whatever changes they want to the questions.  If a mturk Bonus Question is too hard to answer, go ahead and edit it to make it easier for you and others to answer.  We realize that there has been controversy over this issue.  We apologize for not being clearer about this.  We also are okay with users answering mturk Bonus Questions that they themselves have edited.  We enabled this feature by design to make it even easier to submit answers to these questions.  Keep in mind that the primary purpose of mturk Bonus Questions is to encourage Askville users to submit answers to a wider range of questions.  That being said, all other community guidelines, including voting abuse, apply to these questions. 

Voting Abuse Update
We are working on some major changes to our voting system, some of which will be released shortly, based on some of the feedback we have received recently.  We also have banned several accounts due to voting abuse/collusion between members.  Gaming the voting system is a clear cut violation of our guidelines and we will continue to immediately ban members who are colluding with each other with the intent of gaming Askville's ecosystem.  In addition, we have warned/taken action on over 30 other Askvillers who have been negatively voting against certain members of the community.  With our new Community Manager, we hope to stay on top of voting abuse.  That said, please refer to our blog post in March 2007 on Voting 101 to get a better understanding of our voting abuse guidelines:

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2007/03/voting-101.html

Moreover, users who are negatively voting down appealed Bonus Questions (or voting negatively on any appeals based on who the answerer is and not on the quality of the content) are violating our community guidelines.

Christian, our Community Manager, will be posting an Open Forum question that will allow users to give us feedback on the Alpha Lab Bonus Question Box and mturk Bonus Questions.  Thanks again for your patience and feedback as we work to improve these Alpha Lab features.

Sincerely,
AskvilleMayor

Find Questions to Answer on Askville

Introducing our official Community Manager

Hey Askville,

As our community continues to grow and evolve, we realize that we need to be even more actively engaged in the Askville community.  In the past, we have tried to stay clear of conflicts between community members, with the hope that "people can agree to disagree" and that "people will respect others like they want others to respect them".  However, we realize that some people have taken advantage of certain community guidelines that are "gray" (i.e. subject to interpretation and/or not an obvious clear-cut violation) as well as our limited engagement/involvement in numerous issues.  Moreover, having one person dedicate a portion of their time, currently the Askville Mayor, to monitor and manage the community is not a scalable solution, especially given that the Askville Mayor has a lot of other Askville and non-Askville responsibilities.  Consequently, we will officially be creating a new role within the Askville Team - the Community Manager.

We are excited to have one of the co-founders of Askville, Christian Cabanero, fulfill this role.  The Community Manager will be focused on actively engaging with our community.  Christian will actively monitor Askville on a daily basis and more importantly will actively engage with the community via PMs, discussion boards, and even posting questions to get public feedback, which we hope will generate new ideas on how to make Askville a better community!

Below is a quick message that Christian wanted to send out to the community:

ChristianC (Chumpboy)

Hello, I'm one of the co-founders and have been with the Askville team since 2006 as the Sr Manager overseeing the Askville software development team.  It's been an incredible experience seeing over the past year and half watching our community evolve.  It's clear that there are things that people really love about the Askville community, but also things that people wish would change with the community.  This will be my primary area of focus for the foreseeable future as well as figuring out how we, the Askville team, can do a better job serving as hosts to all of you.

Ultimately, I'm here to serve you and so I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts about Askville.  If you've got thoughts, concerns, complaints, an urge to vent, or anything else you'd like to share I'd love to hear from you.

You can send me a personal message through my profile page.  Any correspondence with me will be kept confidential.  I'm looking forward to serving as your community manager and hope to hear from many of you.

We hope that having a dedicated person focused on actively engaging and interacting with the community, will help provide clarity on some of the community guidelines that are "gray", while also help resolve some of the conflicts that are going on within our community.  Ultimately, we hope that this will help generate better community guidelines and also drive new features that we hope will help keep Askville a great place to come visit every single day!

To kick-start Christian's new role, he will be posting a question or two that will ask the community how we can improve Askville.  We also will be posting another blog entry this week on a controversial topic: Bonus Questions!  In the interim, please look out for Christian's question and please continue to give us feedback!

Sincerely,
The AskvilleMayor

Find Questions & Answers on Askville

Raising the Bar for Asking a Question

Hey Askville,

As many of you know, we had introduced a feature that allows newbie users to ask a question by simply typing in an email address.  We were hoping this would lower the bar for asking questions and for encouraging newbies to participate in our community.  While we have achieved this goal, we also realize that it introduced "fly-by-night" askers who never come back to our site.  Moreover, based on the feedback we have received from the community, we have elected to remove this feature.  Consequently, newbies who want to ask a question will now be required to go through the full registration requirement just like it used to be - i.e. you need to make a purchase on amazon or verify your identify via a cell phone.

Why did we do it in the first place?
Askville is still a young community that is growing and it is still in beta.  While Askville is in beta we are introducing features that may or may not work.  In the end, we want to create the best ecosystem and community that will generate the highest quality questions and answers on the web.  Some of the features we introduce are immediately successful (e.g. appeal process), while others need more work (e.g. bonus questions), and some are just bad ideas.  Reducing the bar to ask a question would fall in the last bucket.  We will continue to tweak and improve those features that are "works in progress" and will continue to think of ways to improve Askville.  None of this can be done without your continual feedback.  We rely on your feedback to tell us what is working and what is not working.  We apologize if we aren't moving fast enough, but we are definitely trying our best to make sure that Askville is a great place to ask... answer... meet... play!

Sincerely,
-The Askville Team

Find Questions to Answer at Askville

New Alpha Lab Feature Launched - Askville's Bonus Question Box!

Hey Askville!

We're excited to launch the new Askville Bonus Question Alpha Lab!  From time to time we'll be previewing exciting new Askville features in our Alpha Lab.   Alpha Lab features are experimental features that we want to get your feedback on before they're released to the general public.  Consequently, we've invited a select number of Askville members to try out our latest Alpha Lab feature - "Askville Bonus Question Box"!

Askville Bonus Question Box
The Askville Bonus Question Box is located at the top of every list page (Newest, Popular, Active Questions).   Any question that you decide to answer from the Bonus Question box will automatically multiply your gold payout by 2x (positively or negatively).  For example, if you answer a question through the Bonus Question box and earn 3 stars, instead of receiving 1 gold for your answer, you would earn 2 gold because you answered a question from the Bonus Question box.

Any "Bonus Question" that gets an answer will show up as a "new" question, just like any other question asked on Askville - i.e. Bonus Questions do not appear anywhere on Askville except in the Bonus Question Box, until someone decides to submit an answer to that question.  Furthermore, we've added a question rating feature. If, in your opinion, the question in the bonus box is not a good question, then you can flag it and we will no longer show it to you.

To be clear, only questions that are answered from the Bonus Question Box are eligible for the 2x bonus gold multiplier, so if you see a Bonus Question on any list and you answer that question, you are not eligible to receive the 2x bonus gold multiplier.  Conversely, if 5 people see the same question in the Bonus Question Box and they all decide to submit an answer to that question, they will all be eligible for the 2x bonus gold multiplier.

Just like any other question, you are allowed to appeal any question you've answered from the Bonus Question Box and the 2x gold multiplier will count after the appeal - e.g. If you originally received a 2 star rating (-5 gold) you would lose -10 gold due to the 2x gold multiplier; however, if you appeal that rating and the final rating becomes 4 stars (+5 gold), you would instead earn +10 gold.

One important aspect of the Alpha Lab is that we’re asking you for feedback on our new and developing features. Your feedback will help determine how we refine these new features before they’re launched for the general public.

Have fun and please give feedback on this new feature if you are in the alpha lab.  Remember as a member of Askville's Alpha Lab, your opinion counts!

Regards,
The Askville Team