I've been helping out with the LO 'Ask' site for a bit and I've run into a few roadblocks along the way. The number of unanswered questions on the site zoomed up when a bug in the site code prevented users from marking a question as answered, and the number continues to climb -- over 1,900 right now.
I was previously given the impression that many first-time users were simply not returning to follow-up on their questions, but when I asked a couple of users on the site to mark their (answered) question as 'answered', I was informed that they would if they could, but that they would need to amass 50 karma points to do that -- 48 or 49 more karma points than they already had. There are a couple of things I think we can do to improve the user experience on the site: 1) The karma required to perform operations is much higher on the LO Ask site than on the Askbot software forum: http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/faq/ http://askbot.org/en/faq/ Lowering the threshold karma values a certain amount could empower more people to use the features of the Askbot software, engaging them as participants, not bystanders. 2) The site needs more moderators. If a user answers his own question and doesn't have the karma to accept/close the question, it would be great if a mod could perform that task for him. I'm not talking about an instant response, but a comment on a question by the OP like "Please mark my answer as correct -- I can't do it myself" would ideally be seen (and acted on) by a mod within a week. Sure -- there are a number of other improvements that we could try to make to the site, but I think that lowering the barriers to active participation and adding more moderators are two of the best changes we could make to dramatically reduce the number of outstanding unanswered questions, and to improve the average user's experience on the site. Cheers, -- Robinson 'qubit' Tryon -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/website/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
