Answerbag Blog

Wishing all of you a season of smooth travels, good food, happiness and peace. And if you need respite from all that, Answerbag will be here for you ;).

A special aloha and mele kalikimaka to Joel, who's on his way to Hawaii for a richly deserved break (though I suspect he's really consulting with the president-elect ;)). For those who'd still like to send farewell wishes Joel's way, here's a link to his last blog post:

http://www.answerbag.com/blog/comments/186

Enjoy the last week of 2008--see you in '09!

To you, the amazing people who make Answerbag useful,

Today is bittersweet for me. While this is my last day as a member of Answerbag’s staff and as a Demand Media employee, I am immeasurably proud because I can look at Answerbag, my “baby,” and know that it is helping millions of people every month.

Answerbag started as just an idea in February of 2003, when I wanted to combine the amazing community-generated FAQs from Usenet with the dynamic responsiveness of online forums, and on July 1 of 2003 Answerbag was born. At that time, no one knew the term “Social Q&A,” and there was no Yahoo! Answers, so it was hard for me even to describe to people what the site did, but people who found it seemed to appreciate it, so I kept building it up. The ‘bag’s mission was “to help people find and share knowledge,” and it remains the mission to this day.

With help from Kim Siever and Andy - who has amazingly been on Answerbag almost from Day 1 - I started building out more and more Q&A and getting more people to come to the site. Back then, I reviewed all questions and answers for categorization, duplication, etc, but of course as more questions came in, I needed help, so in late 2004 I brought on our very own Rich Gazan. He was a godsend and quickly took control of the taxonomy and the moderation, and as the flow of questions continued to increase, he brought on our moderators to help.

With the launch of Yahoo! Answers in late 2005, the Social Q&A market became well-established. Many new Q&A sites sprang up, hoping to compete with Yahoo or get acquired, and Answerbag stood its ground and continued to grow steadily. Before long, we found that Yahoo Answers refugees were heading to Answerbag where the community is tighter and generally more friendly.

In 2006 we made the difficult decision to sell Answerbag to InfoSearch Media. InfoSearch helped us build up the team and we made a lot of critical changes to the site including the current homepage model which features all of the latest Q&A, and the cool “New Arrivals” page that lets you follow all the action real-time.

Later in 2006 InfoSearch sold AB to Demand Media, a startup led by Rich Rosenblatt, former CEO of Intermix/MySpace, where it still lives now. Here at Demand Media, we came up with the site design you see now, and we added many more cool features including the Friends List, the dynamic profiles that help you track your feedback, and the customized homepage.

In the last week, we saw Answerbag pass the 1 million unique question milestone, and we are now hosting over 10 million visitors every month which is simply amazing to me. From a scrappy little startup AB is now an impressive force and the #3 Social Q&A site on the Internet behind Yahoo and Answers.com.

I think now is the time for me to move on. Answerbag is as successful as I had ever hoped, so I’m moving on to new challenges. Of course I’ll still be around on the site, but I won’t be involved in the management or development of new features. Demand Media plans on integrating Answerbag Q&A to augment its other sites and I look forward to seeing that happen and to seeing Answerbag continue to mature and flourish under Demand’s direction.

That said, I would like to thank all of you, the people who really make this site tick. We gave you the tools, but you, the community, are the ones answering questions and recognizing the best answers every day, and you are the reason Answerbag Is as vibrant, healthy, and helpful as it is. I am humbled by and grateful for your selfless contributions.

With that, I leave you in Rich's capable hands - he will still be here helping you guys out and taking care of the site. If you’d like to keep tabs on my goings-on, you can check my blog (which I plan to start updating again) at http://joeldowns.com.

Best always,
Joel

Since we've had an Answerbag blog, each Thanksgiving season we've asked you to post what you're thankful for, and there have been many thoughtful and heartfelt responses.

So to continue this fine tradition (and with apologies to those who've posted questions along these lines), what are you thankful for?

Has Answerbag helped you get an important question answered, and would you be willing to be quoted in the Wall Street Journal? If so, feel free to post your story here (please include a link to the question), and we'll forward your responses to a reporter who's expressed interest in hearing your stories. Thanks!

Once you're logged in, you'll see a link above the Q&A list on the homepage labeled "Customize homepage". Click this link, and you'll be able to select specific categories that you like, so you don't have to see Q&A in categories you're not interested in. We hope this makes AB a little easier to use for everyone!

We've had more than a few people report on some site bugs lately; we're working on fixes for all of them, but in the meantime here are some workarounds:

In Firefox, the Search for Members tab works unpredictably from the home page--sometimes you'll retrieve answers instead of members. However, if you launch member searches from other pages, it seems to work.

We still occasionally get reports of "unable to generate animated gif" errors when attempting to upload images which may or may not be animated. Resizing the images and uploading them again sometimes helps, but if this happens to you, please send a report to feedback with as much detail as you can include.

Despite our best efforts, some email providers (AOL especially) still filter out our automated registration and notification emails. If a new user reports registration problems in a question, answer or comment (as many do), feel free to advise them to send a request via feedback and we'll confirm their accounts manually. If you're not getting the notifications you think you should be getting, also let us know via feedback.

Thanks!

Though I haven't run any numbers yet, questions that are chosen as the Topic of the Day seem to get between two and three times more answers than an average question. Though that estimate means more for a relatively new question than one that's already had several dozen answers before we feature it, that response combined with your feedback requests raises the question of how to archive past Topics of the Day.

Though we've had a separate Topic of the Day category suggested and accepted, if we moved questions there, they would not appear in their home category, which is suboptimal. The two ideas we're considering are:

--an administrator flag, akin to craiglist's "Best of," where the questions might be linked from a single page, yet remain in their home categories.

--create a more bloglike entry, where comments could be appended.

Which do you prefer--or do you have other ideas?

We've had a variety of suggestions about how to keep blog comments on topic, while still keeping the ability to use the blog space as a forum for any reports of spam and other misbehavior requiring immediate review by our Community Leaders. So while you're encouraged to post those reports as before, once we've addressed the issue we'll "hide" your comment, so that the rest of the community doesn't have to scroll through pages of "Spammer"..."Got 'em, thanks."

And please remember, anything that doesn't require immediate review, such as flag moderation appeals, category/feature requests etc., please report through the Feedback link at the bottom of every page.

Many thanks!

Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong.com and Demand Media have teamed up in the fight against cancer, and to empower people to take action daily for their overall health. Now Lance wants to know what you have dared to do:

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/916572

Submit your video answers and you could win an autographed bike from Lance! Find out more at:

http://www.livestrong.com/contest/youtube-share-your-story

Answerbag will soon have a new First Lady--our intrepid leader Joel is getting married this weekend!

Congrats to the happy couple!