We just released the new Questionland! It is a major release with many new features which the Gnome takes great pride in and we hope you will enjoy. Since there are so many new moving parts there is the remote possibility that there could be the odd bug. Highly unlikely since this is software and as we all know that almost never happens. BUT, if it does, and you are kind enough to take the time to let us know, we would be most appreciative. Just email feedback@questionland.com.

Side note: My apologies for not responding to your comments on the earlier post. I have been struggling with comments on this blog and still can’t seem to get them fixed. I’ll address the issues brought up in the comments here.

The Major Enhancements:

1. Accessible Design & Rotating Banners

The new design has moved the gnome and the mushroom from the “front office” to the “back office”. The mushroom is still awarded for favorite answers. We think the the new design will be more accessible in terms of content and design. It has been refined since the preview with a little help from Michiko.

For some of you, it will feel a little generic after the quirkiness of the previous design. To maintain our local flavor and character, we will be rotating the top banner regularly with scenes from Seattle. They will all contain the word “Questionland Seattle” somewhere in them, ideally integrated within the picture. We’d love it if you would be interested in sending banners. If we use them you will be credited in the photo description.

The specifications for the picture are that it needs to be very wide and very short (1200+ px wide and exactly 150px tall). If you can add the text “Questionland Seattle” somewhere in a way that fits that would be great. Send your submissions to banners@questionland.com.

2. Following People, Questions and Topics

You can follow people and be notified of their contributions when they happen. You can also follow questions you are interested in and be notified as the answers and comments come in. Finally you can follow an entire category or sub-category (e.g. Food) and get notified of new questions that are posted to that category. A word of caution: excessive following could result in a fair number of emails which might be a tad annoying. Good news: every email comes with a “stop following this” link which stops that specific thread.

Some of you will find this useful, others will think we are trying to create Qwitter or QuestionBook. The reason we added it was twofold: (1) people don’t like checking back to see if there has been a new answer on a question they are interested in, and (2) there are great discussions happening that are effectively invisible to most of us and this is a way to make sure you can follow them if you want. Oh, and a bonus… some of us want to know anytime soundslikepuget says anything. And yes you can follow him on Twitter@soundslikepuget (and should) but you won’t see stuff like this or this.

3. Showcasing Content and People

We have such great people on Questionland and they provide such great insights and answers about life in Seattle. Both experts and top contributors are shown front and center – the people who answered most recently are shown first (so you won’t be seeing rev anymore). You are a top contributor if your reputation is in the top 100.

But what about great contributors who haven’t achieved those lofty heights? No problem. Now that we showcase the best (and latest) answers, you’ll see those too.

4. Voting

I asked for your opinions on this one and got a lot of them. They were extremely helpful, so thank you. We decided that the best approach would be to keep voting on answers and comments, but with some fine tuning:

• Voting helps other people easily view the value that the community attaches to an answer.
• Voting content “up” (thumbs up) means you think it is helpful. There are no restrictions on up-votes.
• Voting it “down” means you think it is factually incorrect, off-topic or not helpful (simple disagreement is not a good reason to vote something down).
• Down voting sends a powerful message to the contributor (intentionally or not). As a result, we have limited down-voting to people who have accumulated a minimal positive reputation of 30 or more. The rationale is that you ought not to be able to criticize others until you have tried it yourself.
• We have also rationed down-votes to 3 times in a 12 hour period. We hope that rationing will lead to a more judicious use of down-votes and will discourage people from going on the occasional down voting rampages.

5. Search

You can now search within a specific type of content (see pic below). So if you want find Fnarf, you can search within “people” and not get every reference to Fnarf.

6. Navigation

Since the most popular way to get around is by picking topics (previously known as categories), we’ve made that easier. You can use the pull down menu in the top navigation bar to go directly to a topic or sub-topic. You will also notice a topics “handle” that follows you down the page on the right margin. If you click that it pulls out the topic drawer and lets you pick one.

7. Announcements

We’ve added a little bar below the navigation to make announcements or notify you of special events, guests, etc. For example, the first announcement will be a link to this blog post.

Thanks

There are other minor enhancements and fixes but that covers the big ones and you probably threw in the towel half way through anyway. If you made it to here, thanks for listening, thanks for your feedback and thanks for making Questionland great for all of us.

If you have feedback on this iteration, I’ll put a question up for you to answer on Questionland.

You may also like:

Questionland Redesign Preview

The All New Questionland Portland

An Update on Questionland 4Q11

Filtering Content: “Family” & Reputation.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 29th, 2011 at 3:43 PM and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.