Hey Askvillers,
We wanted to highlight some of the recently added features to Askville and some other rule changes we have made:
Recent Activity
This feature helps organize all the activity that you generate on Askville, whether it is questions you ask, answers you submit, new discussion posts, new compliments, new private messages, and much more. You can filter your activity as well so if your looking for a
discussion you commented on several days ago, you can filter your
activity by discussions, which will help you more easily find that
comment.
Moreover, we've also allowed you to see certain activities conducted by your friends and faves. This will help you more easily read some of the great content that your friends or faves have created on Askville. That said, we also realize that privacy is equally important for many of our users so we've given everyone the ability to set their recent activity settings to be more private. To do this, just go to My Settings and click on the Privacy tab which will allow you to manage how much information your friends/faves can see via the Recent Activity feature.
To be clear, all information that we display on Recent Activity can be easily discovered if users go to your Profile page, so even if you change your privacy settings, users will still be able to read your content (they just won't be able to do it via the new Recent Activity feature). Although the privacy settings for Recent Activity is basically an "on/off" switch, some users may want to just hide some activities on a case-by-case basis. You can do this on any activity by clicking on the "x" located on the right hand side of each activity (see first screenshot above). This will remove the activity event not only on your page but it will not be viewable for anyone else to see. Also, we've highlighted all activities that are "Private to you", which no one else can see, regardless of what your privacy settings are.
My Questions/My Answers
We've moved your questions/answers to another section of My Profile. You can get to them by either clicking on "History" in your navigation options at the top of My Askville or click on the shortcut links located beneath the Recent Activity header.
We will also notify you of any actions you need to take (e.g. vote on questions, tell you how many answers in progress you have) in the new Action Items box located in the upper right-hand corner of My Askville.
My Answers
We've revamped My Answers so that you can easily filter/find all of your answers based on ratings and topics. So if your looking for all the answers you've submitted in a specific topic, you can click on that topic (or search for it via the search box provided) and we will only display answers that you submitted in that topic. In addition, we show you how many experience points you've earned in that topic and the number of quest coins earned for answering that question.
User Survey and Alpha lab
We'd like to thank everyone that participated in our Alpha lab and everyone who filled out our user survey. We religiously read all the great Askville questions/feedback that you give us on a daily basis, but we also realize that conducting surveys and conducting alpha labs will help ensure that we are building the right things for the good of the entire community and not just a select few. Both the user survey and the alpha lab were extremely helpful in shaping our product roadmap. We will definitely use the alpha lab on a more regular basis as we release new features and will conduct user surveys periodically.
Voting Abuse
For all those who have reported voting abuse, we are falling a little bit behind in going thru all the reports. Please be patient as we respond to each report. It will take some time, but rest assured that we will look at each and every report. That said, we also want to remind people that it is extremely difficult to "overturn" the final rating on opinion-based questions. We realize that this is an issue for some and we are currently looking at ways to improve the voting system as a whole which hopefully addresses some of these issues. Thanks again for being patient.
Modification to Ban User process
Based on a lot of great feedback we received on our ban user process, we've made some minor modifications to the process. Although we will still have the "4 stage" process for banning a user, we will now remove one infraction from a user's record if they had a "clean record" for a 3 month period. So if a user had received their 3rd warning for the same infraction they are still one step away from being banned. However, if they are a good Askville citizen and do not get another infraction for the next 3 months, we will remove one of their infractions as if they only received 2 warnings. This will address the issue of valued members who may have "crossed the line" a few times a long time ago and have been great Askvillers ever since, but are still one step away from being banned (in the previous process). In addition, we will also reserve the right to put Askvillers on probation when we see fit. So, in some cases we may decide to just give an Askviller a probation from Askville (i.e. like a "timeout" for you parents) for a certain period of time in lieu of an outright ban. This will be done only in special circumstances where we feel the Askviller is giving value to the community overall, but may need to have a "timeout" to understand/reflect/meditate on whatever abuse they caused. We hope these two slight modifications will improve our ban user process and thanks to everyone for all the great feedback and ideas that were submitted.
For those who want to read the ban user process again, please go to our previous blog entry found below:
http://askville-blog.amazon.com/2007/05/clarifying_comm.html
Cheers,
The Askville Team
