Askville Blog

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

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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