Askville Blog

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