Case in point – as of this moment one of the top questions is “Is there an argument against getting a flu shot?” Someone answered with bad advice that showed that they don’t understand how immunization works, and it’s received several thumbs down, and none up. That’s a pretty good clue for someone not well versed in the topic to know that someone’s just full of it, and I’m not sure what the moderators would do in this case anyway. It’s doubtful that they have all the expertise to know when bad answers are being proffered.

I think all the other changes, including ditching the thumbs up/down for specific questions, look good.

But I can see how you’d top contributors featured somehow, below or next to the questions would be good.

The one concrete thing down-votes provide is a way to filter out bad contributors. <<— I got two down votes for providing a factual response to "what iranian directors do documentaries?" Tell me how the response "Abbas Kiarostami is a famous Iranian director who has made documentaries" identifies me as a "bad contributor." Is it not true? Was the response not in English? Was it impolitely worded?

I also gave heaps of answer and response space to a question that the questioner did not acknowledge nor give a mushroom to. Three other people were interested in the information and found it useful, but that didn't translate into many up-votes or a mushroom.

I'm used to seeing "Questions" category component positioned more prominently. I wouldn't be necessarily interested in answers unless I asked a question or followed a question, so the question-first,answer-later model makes more sense to me.

[...]one of our visitors recently recommended the following website[...]……

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Thanks for such a thorough critique of the post. Your excerpts demonstrating the writing flaws are for the most part right on. I should do a better job editing before I post.

You are also right that I made things too personal. I think I was incensed by the fact that the owner of the restaurant was sitting one table away from mine while this service fiasco played itself out and didn’t lift a finger to address the issue or make any effort to apologize for what was obviously an exceptionally bad (although not abnormal for Ba Bar) experience.

It was further aggravated by the fact that I and many others have experienced the same disregard for service at other restaurants in the Ba Bar “family”. The people at my office banned Baguette Box from our list of lunch places after repeatedly awful service.

I would be happy to discuss natural selection and the basis for my claims , but that is not a short discussion. I actually have a degree in Physical Anthropology so I am not making things up as I go along. I have also been to restaurants in virtually every major city in the world and while I don’t claim any professional experience managing restaurants, I started my first company out of college so I am familiar with what it takes to get a business going and just how hard that is. I don’t make any of the statements lightly, but perhaps they might have been made somewhat less personally or even less vehemently.

I don’t write this blog for traffic. Indeed my biggest error in writing this post was that it was inappropriate for this blog. My job here is to represent the views of the Questionland community (with some injection of my own) and in this case I did not (they have voiced no opinion on this subject one way or the other). For that I must apologize, not to Ba Bar, but to the Questionland community.

Thanks again for your comments, and good luck with your new blog.