mYfAVE'StOYOU: PRO Q&A Forum Upgrades & Changes

Posted by jennita

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:
1. New: The question has zero responses
2. 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.
3. Answered: There has been a staff endorsement, staff answer, answer marked as "Good Answer" or the question asker has marked the question as Answered.
4. 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.
5. 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?

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