Well hello there friends, it's been a few weeks since we've chatted about our new PRO Q&A forum. To be honest, over here at the MozPlex we've been pretty blown away by the volume and amazingness of both the questions and answers going on in there. Every one of you who has jumped in deserves a huge round of applause!
We've been getting great feedback and have heard from a number of people that they're now addicted to Q&A. We've even had reports of people setting the Q&A home page as their browser home page. ;)
As with anything we do over here in MozLand, we're constantly a work-in-progress. We're excited to have just updated Q&A with a number of changes to help with user experience, rewards and moderation among other things. Let's jump right in and walk through each of the changes you'll be seeing in Q&A.
Fun Goodies
- Some design changes! - You'll notice a new interface for question threads, thumbs, and question status indicators.
- Quick access to your questions and questions to answer - You can get to your private questions faster, and access featured and new questions from the home page.
- Better search functionality - We've updated our search functionality so you can find the question threads you're looking for more easily.
Improvements to Finding & Moderating your Questions
Along with making changes on how MozPoints are earned, we needed a better way to moderate and filter questions and answers. The following modifications have been made for all public questions (which are open to all PRO members and are viewable by non-PRO after 2 weeks).
- In an attempt to get better at figuring out where we need to step in and answer questions, we're improving our methods for determining whether a question has been answered or not. Now, if you've asked a question, you can mark it as answered at any time so we know you've found a sufficient response.
- Questions will now display as:
- New: The question has zero responses
- Unanswered: There have been no staff endorsements, staff answers, or answers marked as "Good Answers". The question asker has not marked the question as answered.
- Answered: There has been a staff endorsement, staff answer, answer marked as "Good Answer" or the question asker has marked the question as Answered.
- Discussion: Maybe you have some questions that are more like on-going discussions or do not have a right or wrong answer. You can mark these as discussion questions.
- Featured: The 50 oldest, unanswered questions are considered featured questions. Responders get double points for any thumb ups they get from others when answering these questions. It is important to note that only one question per user can be featured at any given time, meaning if you have an old, unanswered question you'll want to mark it as answered or as a discussion question if you want your next oldest unanswered question to be featured instead.
MozPoint Modifications
As we're seeing how Q&A is being used and people spend more time in there, we quickly found that it was necessary to make a few changes to the way MozPoints were being handled. We want to be sure to reward people for their participation, plus keep the quality high. There have been some instances where members have complained of answers not being valuable or where a member has used the system to simply build up MozPoints in order to get PRO for free (you get a free month of PRO if you earn 200+ MozPoints in one month, after manual review). With that, following are the changes to MozPoint earnings:
- Rewards for Participation
- In Q&A, you can get up to +20 MozPoints / month for the automatic thumb ups you get on your own content
- Rewards for Quality
- +1 for every thumb up by someone else
- +4 (instead of the old +3) MozPoints for having a response marked as a Good Answer (Note: multiple "good answer" markings from one member to another have an upper limit of 5 each month to help discourage reciprocal MozPoint manipulation)
- You still get +10 for staff endorsements
- Timely Answers
- If you answer a PRO Q&A question within the first four hours of it being posted and your response gets either three thumbs up OR is marked helpful OR is SEOmoz endorsed, you get three bonus MozPoints for your speediness! Go to most recent questions. (Past: +3 MozPoints for any answer in the first 4 hours)
- If you answer questions in the Featured Questions section, you'll get double MozPoints for getting thumbs up from other people! (Sorry, no double points for your own thumbs up.)
Don't Forget...
There are a couple pages I wanted to call out just to make sure everyone had a quick read through them to understand the general "rules." Thanks yo!
- Community Etiquette - This is one of our only "corporate-y" type pages, but it's necessary not only for knowing how to conduct yourself in Q&A but on the blog and in the Community as a whole. You'd make my day if you took a quick read this. :D
- MozPoints - This page goes over all the info you need to know about MozPoints. You can also find this information in Q&A as well.
Whew! Exciting stuff. As I mentioned earlier, it's been amazing to see Q&A kick-off the way it has within the community. If you're not PRO yet and you want to see what the heck we're talking about, why not get started with your Free Trial of PRO?
All positive changes. I love the new Q&A and commend any attempt to make it great.
One of my questions is featured in your screen shot! Does that make me famous?
Yes it does! Congratulations!!! =)
I'd like to see more engagement from expert level users and staff. I've had a few questions that had very little input from advanced users, people I can learn from. Not sure if I should post a private question in that case?
There are definitely cases where it might make more sense to submit a private question. We do try to go in and assign questions to Associates/Staff if they can help with a specific question. But if you're not getting the answer you'd hope for in public, feel free to use the private! :)
Thanks for clearing this up.. especially after the somewhat ironic discussion... in the Q&A.
Thank you for the tweak. The collapse in the QnA quality had me on the verge of cancelling. Hopefully this will be a better balance.
Yikes! Well I definitely hope this helps. :) We're always open to improvements so send them our way if you have other ways to improve Q&A. :)
What I saw really was people gaming the four hour window to get those bonus points and this tweak should help that.
But then, I haven't had a staffer review my question yet (posted 11.4.12) or any response of any depth (dealing with a Panda issue) so jury is still out. I accept, it could be my question is poor. I wrote it like I would under the old system where I didn't have to compete for attention.
One thing that also came out with this update, is to show Associates and Staff members. Previously we didn't call them out in any way so you probably did get a question answered, moderated by one of us but it didn't show who they were. This update should help with that as well. :)
I am finding that having the "Answered" visible is very helpful as I can move quickly down the list and help those who do not have answers yet.
Great updates to the Q&A.
The three tabs (new/featured/hot) makes it a lot easier to find new, exciting questions.
And I really like that the speedy ppints only are awarded if enough thumbs are giving.
I am sure this Q&A section will keep improving :)
Yes, I really love this too. It makes it so nice to go in there and quickly find new questions and ones that need some attention. Great for users and moderators. :)
Agreed. I like the tabs too.
I would really like to see the email me to be updated. I do not need an email each time someone comments on the thread, but just when someone comments on my post within the thread. I like helping out in the Q&A, but getting 30 emails of people posting to the same thread is too many.
You may have already covered this as I have posted this before, but I am just getting back to SEOmoz after my move to San Diego.
Thanks! Jenny from the C-Block!
Thanks Richard! This is definately on the list for future features. Feel free to email me at [email protected] with any other suggestions. Thanks again!
Thanks! I really like this upgrade and have been answering a few questions. Looking forward to more!
Hi there!
I am trying to find out why my question is not visible already 2nd day after I posted it. I was looking for help sections, some FAQ, looking for cache time or moderators approval, but I did not find any information about it anywhere in seomoz.org, even I googled it. (this is how I came in this blogpost).
(Also My Questions section is empty, I cannot see my question from yesterday and even my answers to questions..)
I was typing it lot of time. Now I do not know if there is something wrong with my question (helt for moderation someway) or it is deleted or lost. I was even starting to think there is something about with my free trial of the pro membership. I was really looking for any sings about this.
Sorry for interruption the amusement, but I feel somehow embarrassed about it. I know this case may happen very stupid, but its my first time here in the QA (although my account registration is almost 2 years old).
Hello! Please, please don't feel embarrassed! It is an issue on our end unfortunately. :( For some reason new questions weren't showing up properly after they'd been asked. This is definitely an issue with the site and not with your question in any way. From what I can tell, right now the new questions are now showing up. Please take a look at the list now, and hopefully yours is there. If not, would you mind emailing help at seomoz.org about the issue so we can track it.
Thank you! And again I'm so sorry this caused you to feel that there was an issue with you or your question.
Jen
Thank you for your reply, Jennifer!
I saw the list. The question is in My QA section,
Sorry once again for complaining like that. Hope everything is doing great and properly.
Greetings from me!
Surely making the point limit per day or per week would be better than per month!
If somebody uses up all their points right at the start, getting into it all and then has to go the rest of the month with no points at all it could be a little dis-heartening. Where-as if you only have to wait until the next day, or next few days then it wouldn't be so bad. Maybe a max of 3 auto points per day or something?
Hi Steve, thanks for the suggestion - I think this makes a lot of sense. I'll add this to the list for future features to consider. Thanks!
I actually stopped being a pro member a month ago due to the fact that I didn't find that the forum lived up to my expectations.. Seems I need to reconsider :)
If you have more than 500 mozpoints on a free account you can use the forums for free
Agreed. I didn't quite find the discussions happened as quickly as I was refreshing the page, but I guess that is a side effect of a gated community, as opposed to something like Quora.
Nice changes. Keep up the good work.
I am a big fan of the new changes, although some of the stuff was being fussy in Firefox the other day. I will check back tomorrow and see if everything is working. If not I will shoot the staff a message about what I am seeing.
Thanks! If you see anything weird, be sure to use the feedback form on the left of the page. Thanks for your help!
Certainly should remove some of the abuse that was going one but at the same time, it removes some of the instant gratification of answering a question.
Equally, the whole members thumbing each other up does not seem to have much traction in the Q&A system so I am not sure if the extra points for speedy answers will be allocated to all great answers.
I know I try to answer questions where I can contribute and to provide an actual answer to the recipients request but some questions I have spent up to an hour answering on topics that I am well versed on have gone by without so much as a thumbs up. I think it is going to need more monitoring by the admins to ensure that great answers get their just rewards.
Certainly a step in the right direction though!
CheersMarcus
Yeah I agree entirely. These changes are definitely a step in the right direction though.
I agree that there should be tighter moderation. People will be careful not to post rubbish when they see active moderation. I dont see moderation on Q and A absent on most occasions.
Sadly, seems like seomoz is trying to lessen the burden of the moderator and not thinking about increasing moderation staff.
Thanks for the feedback, I'm sorry you feel that we're not moderating Q&A but I assure you we are. Perhaps we don't comment on every single question but we do have people in there working every day. I'd like to make sure that Keri Morgret specifically gets lots of kudos for all the great work she does in there every single day.
Thanks!
Moderator activity will also be more visible with this upgrade. There are a lot of moderators in the system, but they haven't been as visible because they didn't have the Associate badge underneath their avatar -- previously, you had to mouse over their avatar to realize that they were part of SEOmoz and not just another user.
I have been waiting for the post since I remarked the changes in the Q&A section :-). e.g. the "featured" tab raised some questions - but all is clear now.
That tweet from Alan is fantastic... I believe that with his constance and obsession with Q&A he will be reaching the 5000+ points and awarded as SEO God very soon by the MozPoint system :)
LOL, note to self: Tweet @SEOmoz more often! ;)
I love the new Q&A! Whilst it's not quite my home page yet, it is one of my top visited sites in my Chrome browser dashboard!
Well done to the whole team!!
@Jen:
I am not fully buying into the new system of distribution of mozpoints.
You want people to participate and you say you get only 20 points per month on particpation? In a community, you need to incentivize participation and this will surely curb enthusiasm.
" In Q&A, you can get up to +20 MozPoints / month for the automatic thumb ups you get on your own content."
If i were you or someone in the decision process, I wouldnt keep a cap on this. I would rather have that you can earn a max of X +3 points a month.
Also, rather than moderating it, you are actually decreasing particpation? sounds as if you are really short on staff or something? c'mon, this is a community....
I understand that there have been attempts at gaming the system with the open way of distribution of mozpoints and I dont see much of a problem with the other conditions that you have in place for earning mozpoints, but be sure that you look into the 20 point/month rule and rethink.
@saibose,
Jen can add more details when she comes online, but this message is not saying that you can only get 20 MozPoints a month total from Q&A. You can get those 20, PLUS 10 for each staff endorcement, PLUS the bonus for timely answers.
Maybe its just me, but I think on terms of ROI (return on Investment). If I spend 5-10 minutes of my time answering a question, what do I get in terms of return? Possibilities say that only 1 out of 20 odd would have a helpful answer vote and a smaller probability of being staff endorsed (considering that there maybe better answers in the thread). Now, what is my driving force after I have answered 20+ questions? What does SEOmoz give in return of creating targeted content on the website?
Im with you here. Im a huge gamer and i love gamification + SEO! but capping it does take the shine off it.
The simple answer of it is that you now have to make sure you are giving good answers in order to earn points. Far too many times I've seen extremely substandard answers (substandard by my view at least) pushed out in the Q&A section just so someone could grab the bonus Mozpoints for being the first answer within the 4 hour period.
Whenever I go to the Q&A section to answer questions, I do so wanting to find interesting discussion and to hopefully help someone. Not to earn MozPoints. The points are just a fun little side game for me. My true goal is to get someone to mark my answer as helpful, or even have it SEOMoz endorsed... because then I know that I actually did something good for someone else.
In short, the goal of the Q&A section is to help others and explore discussions. Not to earn MozPoints.
Hi Saibose,
Thanks for the feedback! We definately want to make sure that the point system is fair. I want to clarify that the 20 MozPoints / month max is only for the points you get from yourself. So when you post a question or comment and you receive the automatic thumb up from yourself, those are the only points we're limiting here. All the MozPoints for thumbs up you receive from other users on your response are still unlimited.
With the addition of the Featured section, there is another opportunity for points earning - double MozPoints for thumb ups from other users. Since Q&A provides nearly unlimited opportunities for participation, we didn't want the points gained from Q&A participate outweight points for participation in other areas of the site (SEO Blog and YOUmoz). Instead, we're trying to provide more incentives for quality vs. quantity.
I'd love to chat more about this and get your ideas for alternatives in future updates. Feel free to email me at [email protected] to discuss. Thanks!
Miranda