Live QnA: Blog

Tags are back!

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 04:52:01 GMT

Hi all – when we rolled out our changes in our most recent release, we heard lots of feedback and especially noticed that folks have issues with tagging. While working to improve QnA, we inadvertently broke tag suggestion, and we’re sorry this happened. Gianluca, our indefatigable algorithms and tagging engineer, has found the issue and our team has tested and released this fix onto the site.

Check it out:

Figure 1: Tag suggestion works when asking a question!

Figure 2: Tag suggestion works when searching QnA!

Our tag suggestions are still not perfect (we’re working on improving this), but now the system suggests a few tags which definitely do apply. Before the fix, I had to add every tag manually into the list whenever asking a question, and when I searched, I would never find any related tags. Now, this is fixed. :)

Thanks to everyone who noticed these issues and gave us feedback about it. We are committed to making this site the best it can be. If you have feedback, please let us know over here on our boards.

—Nate-QnA

Recent changes to improve the community experience

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:57:58 GMT

As we blogged about a few weeks ago, we recently made some improvements and changes to QnA in response to your feedback. You can learn more about those changes by reading that entry.

I wanted to take some time to share with you some information about changes we have made to improve the community experience of QnA. Since earlier this year, we have been committing to doing more about making QnA a site that is safe, useful, and friendly. Already we’ve made some “behind the scenes” changes to tune the way QnA works, so that those who seek to disrupt the harmony of QnA are less able to.

In this most recent update to QnA, we have taken the next step in making QnA a better place to be with some very visible changes. I know this was covered in the previous blog post, but I just wanted to call this out again as there has been some confusion about this particular system.

All content that is reported for abuse on QnA is reviewed before it is completely removed from QnA. Although agreeing to our Code of Conduct is required to sign up for an account on QnA, sometimes community members, especially new ones goof and end up posting content that needs to be removed. Previously, things would simply disappear – now, if something you posted was removed by QnA’s administrators you will generally see this notice on your Your QnA page:

If you do not see this message, that’s a good thing as it generally means you’ve been doing great on QnA. If you do see this notice, it is the surest way for you to know that you have had content removed by administrators. To assist new members in understanding why their content was removed, we now provide reasons. This way, people can learn how to post more appropriate content.

If you see the message above, click Find out why to go to a list of your most recently removed convent. Review the content and the Code of Conduct, and then click Agree to get back to enjoying QnA. Here’s an example:

Please note that once you click Agree to agree to follow the rules set by the QnA community, the notices of recently removed content disappear and are no longer available.

I also wanted to take the time out to discuss a very related topic: we have also implemented a new set of short term and daily limits on certain activities to help mitigate the effects of those seeking to disrupt the harmony of QnA. Brand new members and members who have recently had content removed will have these limits enacted. If everything is working as expected, then the vast majority of citizens of QnA should not see any difference. If you do encounter one of these limits, you will receive a distinct notice informing you that your content was not accepted. It’s part of our effort to protect the community, and be more open and transparent when we are taking such measures.

The QnA community is made up of people, and as people, mistakes will happen. I know there is concern about getting banned from QnA, and I wanted to assure you that we take this very seriously, and on a case by case basis. We hate to force people to leave the QnA community, so we do it sparingly to protect the rest of the community, and to ensure that repeat offenders stay out. I also know that there has been some recent events by certain users to take advantage of our safeguards in unacceptable ways - I want to assure you that we are studying this matter, and are in the process of tweaking the behind-the-scenes system to adjust for this.

This isn’t exactly a fun topic to write about, but it is a topic that’s important to us as it is our goal to ensure that the QnA community stays safe, friendly, and useful.

Thank you for your time.

-Dennis-QnA

It's "T" time for QnA

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:41:49 GMT

As you may have noticed, we are continually tweaking, listening, learning and adding new features to the Live Search QnA Beta web site. Simultaneously, we are in the process of growing the QnA community and have many new users coming in to ask questions to our loyal and expert QnA’ers. As our community grows and diversifies itself through new question askers and new discussions, so does the QnA team. I wanted to take a moment to introduce our newest member of the QnA program management team, Teresa (aka “T”).

Here’s what T had to say about herself in her own words:

“I came to Microsoft a little over 5 years ago when the startup I worked for, Connectix was acquired. My first four years were spent as a Program Manager (PM) for the Mac Business Unit. I became the PM for Ratings & Reviews about a year ago (Ratings and Review is the backend technology that powers the star ratings and reviews that you see on many MSN sites including MSNBC articles.)
While I liked my job I didn't have that passionate fire that comes from doing something you love. I decided to explore other Microsoft career opportunities and narrowed my target to one team and one specific job ... this one. And now, I’m very happy to say that I’m a PM for QnA! I'm still doing my happy dance. :o) You may know me as Sweet T, but from now on I’ll be T-QnA.
I've been a user of QnA since April 2007 and I still laugh about my first days on the site when I was called a troll and I unknowingly took a long-time member’s name. I got addicted to the site for both the educational questions and the more social ones. I found that the glue that holds the site together is the wide variety of users and the fact that in spite of our differences in opinions when someone is in need we all pull together to offer support.
While I may (okay, if we’re totally honest, will) make mistakes along the way, you have my promise that I will do my best for both you and the QnA team.”

Thanks T and welcome to the team!

-Heather-QnA

About the latest updates to QnA

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:19:56 GMT

We are excited to bring you the latest set of updates to the QnA site! This blog post highlights the major elements that we've changed in this new release, which went live earlier tonight (Tuesday 7/22/08).

Points & Incentive changes:

First: <Imagine triumphant music playing in the background> Yes, indeed the rumors are true… based on popular and consistent feedback from the community, we’ve brought back the point you receive when you vote for best answer. We haven’t made any changes to the 4 bonus points you receive when the answer you choose ends up winning best answer. That incentive is still there. But now members will also get 1 QnA point up-front just for casting a vote.

The truth behind this change… is that prior to our last release, we heard complaints from the community about members who were “point chasing” by casting votes willy nilly just to get a point for each vote (i.e. they weren’t taking the time to truly choose the best answer) but we've discovered that this wasn't the case. We thought we would rectify this situation by removing the incentive for folks to be rewarded for generic votes. Well, based on our findings and those pointed out by others in the community, that didn’t actually work out the way we thought it would. We assumed that users would still be incented to vote because it was the “right thing to do” in our QnA ecosystem -- but we have seen a decrease in the number of best answers chosen by our community because of a drop in voting volume. So we sit here humbly accepting “blame” (yes, indeed it was our fault for not anticipating the ramifications) and we’ve now restored the ability to get 1 point for voting. Thank you all for your candid feedback here.

Second: We’ve also seen a decrease in the number of abuse reports coming into our moderation team and because of this we’re no longer deducting a point for abuse reports that get overturned. It’s important for us to learn and refine the rules of moderation and the Code of Conduct and for the community to continue reporting content that appears to be a breach of the Code of Conduct – for that reason, we do not want to discourage the community from reporting abuse.

New feature! Show violations page:

Many members of our community have complained that they do not get notified when their content is removed from the QnA site and they don’t learn the reason for the removal. We’ve now introduced a feature where you’ll be able to see which pieces of your content have been moderated along with an explanation of what part of the Code of Conduct it violated. This feature will be accessible via a link that will appear on Your QnA (Figure A). After you click "Find out why," you'll be taken to a page that shows you your recent issues (Figure B).

Figure A: Your QnA page showing message about content being removed

Figure B: Example of a "Recent issues" page showing content that has been removed along with an explanation

Improvements to site navigation and general design improvements:

There were a number of “applying the polish” type of improvements we made across the QnA site in this recent release. We based these improvements on the specific pieces of feedback we heard from our community in our message board thread that we’ve been tracking since the last release of QnA.

1. Getting to the “latest questions” on QnA – when we launched the re-design of the home page in April, one of the most common questions asked both in the message boards and on the site itself was “How do I go see all the latest questions – where do I click to see more?” While many users since then have discovered the “See all” link that appears on the home page (Figure C), and others have started using the “Answers” tab for discovering the latest questions (Figure D)… we decided to go one extra step and add a link for “Latest questions” to the site-wide navigation (Figure E) -- those are the links that appear across the top of all of our pages. So it now will be even easier for you to always be only 1 click away from getting to the most recently asked questions on the site.

Figure C: "See all" link in Latest questions module on homepage

Figure D: "See all" link in Answer tab, which takes you to the Latest questions page

Figure E: "Latest Questions" link in the global navigation

2. Question titles were getting cut off in list views – Community members told us that it was hard to know the full context of a question if it was a longer question. We are now displaying the full 100 characters of a question title in all views on the site.

Figure F: New version of the site showing all 100 characters of question titles in list views

3. Seeing the state of your questions on Your QnA (Open for Answers, Open for Voting, Closed) -- We’ve now made it much easier to understand and quickly “see” the state of a question on QnA that you’ve asked or answered. As noted by a few observant folks in our community on the message boards, this was a part of the interface that we removed in our April re-design but it had the mistaken side effect of making it harder to distinguish which questions were in the voting stage. We’ve now added back in the question state to the Your QnA page with the graphical icons we used before, so many of our community members will recognize these graphics (Figure G). In addition, we believe this will help with discovering questions that need votes since it’s now more obvious to see the questions that are no longer open for answers.

Figure G: Graphical icons indicating whether the question is open for answering, open for voting, or closed

4. Show question page - One of the more noticeable improvements you’ll see in the QnA site design is an update to what we call the “show question” page this is one of the most popular pages on the QnA site and a number of keen observers in our community mentioned a few really good things that needed improvement on this page after our last site update.

a. Problem: Too much vertical scrolling “up & down” on the page. Solution: We’re making better use of space and having more of the key content appear towards the top of the page (Figures H and I).

Figure H: Old version of "Show Question" page, which didn't make the best use of screen real estate

Figure I: New version of "Show Question" page, which makes better use of the available screen real estate

b. Problem: It’s hard to differentiate between “add answer” & “add comment” area on the page. Solution: New interface that makes this much easier to distinguish (Figures J and K).

Figure J: Old version of input area for adding an Answer

Figure K: New version of input area for adding an Answer

c. Problem: It’s difficult to know the status of a question. Solution: We have a new module that clearly shows whether a question is Open for answering, Open for voting, or Closed (Figure L).

Figure L: New version of "Show Question" page features these types of status modules towards the upper right of the page

d. Problem: It’s difficult to get back to the list of questions that I just came from – I have to use “back” on my browser often because the “Previous & Next” question links appear towards the bottom of the page. Solution: We now are providing navigational links at both the top and bottom of our pages to make it easier for our customers to get to additional questions on the site or to get back to the list where they originate from (Figure M).

Figure M: New version of "Show Question" page featuring "Previous," "Next," and "Back to list" links towards top of the page

5. Ask question experience - We’ve made small adjustments to the layout to make better use of space and to make the flow more usable (and also have put more of the key content “above the fold”). You’ll also notice that we moved the “related questions” module to the right side of the page so it won’t detract from just completing the experience of asking a question (Figures N and O).

Figure N: Previous version of Ask flow

Figure O: New version of Ask flow

Firefox 3 support:

We’ve now introduced support for the Firefox 3 browser for all major functionality on the site. The only thing we haven’t had time to fix in this release is some potential “flashing” if you try to use the QnA spell checker when using Firefox 3. In this case, we encourage you to use the spell check feature built into the Firefox browser itself. There may be some other fit & finish issues in Firefox 3 such as very long user names getting cut off inadvertently - but all the major pieces of functionality should be working end to end now… please let us know if you encounter any difficulties.

We know that there are additional things that the community would like us to address in future updates – some of the improvements we’re still investigating based on community input include:

Questions/content disappearing & then re-appearing on the QnA site.
Votes occasionally appear to "not stick."
Feedback on improving the logic and ranking of the Superstars list on the QnA site – the community has asked us to consider how recently the account has been active in determining the ranking of Superstars.
Problems with the “back” button on the browser – QnA members report that they get “stuck” on the current page and cannot go “back” when they click back on the browser. We’ve now identified what the problem is; we’re still working on a solution here.

There are additional minor fixes we made here & there throughout the site as well but we think this covers many of the issues that community members pointed out to us after we shipped the last set of updates to the site. We’d love to hear your feedback on what additional things you’d like to see improved. If you have more feedback, please join us in discussing this on the QnA message board thread here that is designated specifically for this purpose: “Your Feedback on the QnA release 7/22”

Happy QnA-ing!

-QnA Team

Updates for our Beta Product

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:08:53 GMT

Live Search QnA is a beta product. Some of you have asked what this means in terms of the product we’re working to deliver you. So, what does it mean that QnA is a beta site?

Beta means, above all, that this service is still evolving. We're exploring options to improve your experience with the service and community; your feedback is important to help us make the right choices. As an online service, we can try out new things and respond to your ideas to try out new and interesting things.

Unfortunately, part of the fact that we’re a beta site and still testing means that not everything we try works perfectly. This means that from time-to-time, you may see some glitches in functionality and when the members of our community point these out, we work on investigating them with our development and quality assurance engineers to figure out the right ways of fixing them. Sometimes these fixes are somewhat straightforward (such as where to place a link on our site) but at other times, they are more complex and involve a bit more thinking and investigation. When the community provides us with feedback, we create a “bug” to track the issue in special software we use here at Microsoft, and then work on prioritizing these issues to get them fixed ASAP. We cannot close a bug until we have a firm plan that has been tested and is ready to be released to our web site for you to see and experience.

You’ve definitely made that known to us, and we’re working to make things better. After all, this is our site, “our” including you, the users of QnA we hold near and dear to our hearts; we take your feedback very seriously, and we’re taking steps to address the problems you face as you use the site day by day.

Speaking of which, our next release is coming tomorrow so we’d like to give you an advance notice that the QnA site will be down for maintenance tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday, July 22nd PDT time zone). In this upcoming site release, you should expect to see a number of changes to address improvements we heard from the community, such as changes made to restore 1 point for voting. Voting for good answers should be a win for everyone: readers will see great answers for each question, voters will get rewarded for their good judgment, and answerers will earn best answers and the corresponding reputation that comes with it.

Rest assured your feedback is not lost on us. We genuinely appreciate your feedback, thoughts, concerns, criticisms, and suggestions for improving QnA – it’s what makes this place a great community for us all, so please keep it coming.

--Nate-QnA, Program Manager

Introducing our Software Design Engineer and Software Design Engineer in Test interns for the summer….

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:57:22 GMT

A common misconception is that we only have Program Managers (PM) working on Live Search QnA. That’s definitely not the case – we have an outstanding team that also includes Software Design Engineers (SDE), and Software Design Engineers in Test (SDET). However, some of our team members are just a bit more blog shy than others.

Fortunately, we have two who aren’t so shy! Having introduced our PM interns last week, I’d like to introduce our other interns: Derrick (SDE) and Shreya (SDET)!

Again, in alphabetical order, here’s what Derrick has to say about himself:

Hi everyone. My name is Derrick Isaacson and I am excited to be a part of the Search Communities team. I grew up in the mountain valley of Salt Lake City, UT and attended college nearby at Brigham Young University where I studied computer engineering.

I moved to Seattle, WA when I graduated to work as a software development engineer for Amazon.com and loved being in the Pacific Northwest. At Amazon I worked on a team that owned a tier one service for the website that provided “offering” data (seller Jane is offering 10 copies of Harry Potter for $9.99) to the site. I left Amazon and started a master’s program in computer science at Stanford University last fall.
I enjoy the outdoors including skiing, hiking, camping, fishing and cycling. I think The Office is hilarious. I also play percussion when I can find a low key concert band or symphony to play in. I look forward to learning and working with the QnA Team!

And Shreya:

Hi everyone I am Shreya, studying for my Masters at San Jose State University. I completed my bachelors of engineering and have also worked as a software engineer trainee for a year. During that time I have worked mostly with Visual C+++. Along with my studies I also love to be involve in other technical activities. I am one of the active members of Society of Computer Engineering, SJSU.
My hobbies include Swimming, Playing Volleyball, Dancing and solving Puzzles. Along with Programming the thing I am most passionate about is Dancing. I have completed MA in Indian classical dance and I have given various performances also.
I am very excited to work with Microsoft Live Search QnA team as an SDET intern.

We’re super excited to have these folks on our team as they bring a fresh perspective and lots of energy. This is shaping up to be an excellent and exciting summer here at QnA HQ!

Have a happy Independence Day weekend!

-Dennis-QnA
Live Search QnA Program Manager and Intern Introducer

Introducing our Program Manager interns for the summer…

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:08:57 GMT

Summer is here, and so are our summer interns. Microsoft has a fantastic college internship program that lasts for 12 weeks where students get to experience what it’s like to work at a fantastic software and services company. There’s also a host of perks as well.

Chen and Peter joined the team recently and we have some pretty awesome projects for them to take ownership of. Our interns definitely don’t just pour coffee here! (Actually they can’t since our coffee machines are semi-robotic!) I am super excited to have them take a fresh look at QnA, and I have high hopes that their work will translate to cool features and experiences for the QnA Community. In alphabetical order, here’s what Chen has to say about himself:

Hey everyone. My name's Chen. I was born in China and moved to Nashville, Tennessee at age 7. In 7th grade, I transferred to a suburban public school near Philadelphia, where I finished my secondary education.
Presently, I am a rising Junior at Harvard College studying Econ/CS. Outside of school, I see myself as a social worker, an aspiring entrepreneur, but most importantly – an ardent tech enthusiast. My first experiences with technology date back to the night my dad brought home the first family computer in December 1996. That Compaq Presario altered the course of my life.
Thanks to this passion, I have followed several of today's most successful tech-based companies from the very beginning. These days, I live on TechCrunch, Mashable, SimpleSpark, and many other entrepreneurial sites in constant search for the next big thing. I enjoy analyzing successful web technologies, business and marketing strategies, figuring out why they work, and seeing whether these innovative techniques can be implemented elsewhere.
I see myself as a chill, kind of atypical Harvard student who take things seriously only when need be, but gets everything done - on time and in style. Some of my hobbies include, Halo 3, Super Smash Bros, swimming, Wendy's Junior Beacon Cheeseburgers, Bennigan's hot wings, programming, tennis, writing business proposals, running along The Charles, and spending quality time with friends.
I’m very excited about joining the Live Search QnA team and I look forward to becoming an active participant in the QnA community!

And here’s what Peter has to say:

Hi everyone! My name is Peter. I am a Finnish citizen, but haven’t actually lived there for more than a few months at a time. I spent most of my childhood in Saudi Arabia as an expatriate. Growing up in Saudi was a little strange, but was actually very good for me. As there wasn’t much to do, I spent most of my time studying. By the age of 16 I had developed a good work ethic, and I’m happy to say that so far it’s paid off!
After Saudi I moved to a boarding school in London. Two years later I graduated with an IB diploma and started studying electrical engineering at The University of California Santa Barbara (woohoo GO GAUCHOS!). I am currently a senior at UCSB.
As we all know though, all fun and no play make for some dull people. I actually enjoy skim boarding, and just throwing around a Frisbee. Some of you may be glad to hear that I am also a gaming dork. I love to play video games like the new Super Smash Bros., and epic titles such as MGS4, and Gears of War.
For the right here and now though, I am interning with Microsoft’s Live Search QnA team. It doesn’t take long to realize that the team working here is ambitious, and driven to help make QnA better every day. I look forward to working with them, and to hopefully bring you some new and exciting features!

These two have had so much excitement and energy for QnA, that they’ve already been posting Questions and Answers on the site. We’re glad to have them onboard. Keep an eye out for them!

-Dennis-QnA
Live Search QnA Program Manager

Question: What is the role of the QnA MVP and who is the new addition to the QnA MVP family?

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:11:53 GMT

In March 2007, we introduced our first MVP (Most Valuable Professional) focused on QnA, Ron. Today we are proud to introduce our second MVP for QnA, Mindy who will be joining to assist Ron as another Windows Live MVP focused on Live Search QnA beta.

Some folks in our community will recognize Mindy as “Mission Jesus Mom” (her former QnA nickname). Mindy has been a fixture on the QnA site and the Boards. She has done a lot of work outside of QnA as well, advising users independently and pointing them to helpful technical online resources. She is an MVP due to her continued support and direction that she provides to other members in the community in assisting them on using the QnA site, constantly escalating bugs and issues with the QnA beta site, and by providing guidance and direction on the QnA message boards.

Mindy has been with QnA since the September 2006 and consistently shows a lot of enthusiasm in helping to investigate problems and has been a positive influence on the QnA community. Here’s a bit more about Mindy in her own words:

“I am ‘pretty much’ an open book but for those who don’t know me, here are a few details about what I do when I am not on QnA. I am married with children whose ages range from 8 – 24. I enjoy motivational speaking and presentations in various public forums. I mentor/counsel people of all ages and backgrounds in various locations and organizations. I do a great deal of public speaking mostly on the topics of motivation, encouragement, joy, striving for excellence and ways to improve your life. I also hold a real estate license in the State of New York and volunteer in many organizations and for many charities.
I am pleased to be honored with the MVP designation and I am excited about serving this AWESOME QnA community in a more visible and tangible way.”

Welcome aboard Mindy!

In addition, over the past few months, we have noticed a lot of confusion around the role of the Microsoft MVP within the QnA community and we wanted to take a moment to provide some clarity around the Microsoft MVP program and also answer some of the FAQ’s we get on QnA around the role of the MVP:

Question: What is the role of the Microsoft MVP?

Answer: Microsoft MVPs are an amazing group of individuals. By sharing their knowledge and experiences and providing objective feedback, MVPs help people solve problems and discover new capabilities. Microsoft recognizes and awards MVPs as our way of saying thank you for their demonstrated commitment to helping others in technical communities worldwide.

Click here for frequently asked questions about Microsoft MVP’s.

Question: Why are MVP’s important to QnA?

As we continue to make QnA a better place for you to ask and provide great questions and answers, we find that we need more and more assistance welcoming new users, answering questions about the site, and posting responses in discussions in our message boards. MVP’s spend their own free time to help build the QnA community and support others. They provide the QnA product team with valuable constructive feedback around where we need to improve the site moving forward.

MVP’s are similar to other members of the QnA community but in addition to participating on the site and on our message boards, it’s their role to help evangelize QnA, the technology, welcome newcomers, and overall act as “model citizens” in the virtual QnA community. You will also find them providing tips and best practices on how to engage with others in the community.

Question: Are MVP’s moderators?

Answer: No. MVP’s are not moderators any more or less so than any other member on QnA, they have the ability to report abuse on the QnA web site like any other member of QnA. In addition, they often share technical suggestions, problems, bugs, or other feedback to help the product team understand the community perspective.

While it’s completely fine for those in our community to criticize the QnA site, to tell us what’s wrong, what needs to be improved, to be critical, to push the QnA Product team to provide a better experience on the Live QnA beta site, it’s not OK to harass or call out individual members of the QnA community, our MVP’s, or the QnA product team, nor make personal harassing remarks about each other – on QnA or in our Message Boards. The Code of Conduct applies equally to all members of the community.

Question: How do I reach an MVP if I need assistance?

Answer: If you have additional questions that you’d like to address to either Ron or Mindy, please use their Spaces accounts or the message boards (though because there are many more members in our community than MVP’s), we cannot promise that they will have time to respond to all inquiries. Another great way of reaching folks when you need assistance is tagging your question “qna” or “qna team,” on the Live Search QnA beta web site itself.

Question: How can I become an MVP for a different Microsoft product?

The MVP FAQ page provides you with more information about how to become a Microsoft MVP – here’s a quick snippet:

“Individuals are nominated for the MVP Award by their peers or by Microsoft, based on their contributions during the previous year to offline or online technical communities. Each nominee's contributions are then compared to the other candidates' contributions for the same year to determine who will receive the award.
Nominees are chosen from traditional and emerging community venues, including public news groups, forums, third-party Web sites, user groups, book authors, event speakers, Web boards, blogs, and wikis. Current MVPs reside in over 90 countries, write in 30 languages, and share their expertise in over 90 Microsoft technologies.”

Firefox browser version 3 and QnA

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:23:36 GMT

Yesterday, as many of you know, the Firefox version 3 browser was released to the public. We wanted to proactively notify our community that the Live Search QnA beta site does not yet offer support for Firefox 3 so you will not be able to post a question or answer to QnA in the Firefox 3 web browser.

This was not intentional, but as with all new product and software releases, we need to test and evaluate this new web browser to understand the changes we need to make to QnA to support it. In the meantime, we wanted to ask members of our community to either stay with Firefox 2 or use an alternative to Firefox such as Internet Explorer version 7 which are both supported browsers for the Live Search QnA beta site.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause and will update you once we have an update on our Firefox 3 support plans.

Thanks,

QnA Team

(updated to add this link on 7/16/08) - Here's a link to older versions of the Firefox browser: http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

Great questions, great answers, and introducing Katarina-QnA

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:29:40 GMT

It’s almost summer again – only about a week left to go. Last summer, David posted about writing great questions and great answers. In the past year, many new members have joined the QnA community, so we’d like to summarize the main points again here:

Great questions

· Are worded as questions (with a question mark at the end)

· Contain details in the details section to explain more about the context of the question (though asking a good question and then providing your own answer in the question details doesn’t qualify )

· Can be answered by anyone else in the community (including new members), and will find helpful (check out our featured questions for examples)

· Summarize the essence of the question in the question title

· Are formatted well and spelled correctly with standard capitalization (ALL CAPS LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING AND CAN SOLICIT ANNOYED RESPONSES FROM OTHERS IN THE COMMUNITY)

· Abide by the QnA Code of Conduct

Great answers

· Answer the question and are honest, thorough, and straightforward

· Present a great summary of your thoughts and opinions with any supporting data, facts, or knowledge

· Often include links to the page from which you used to help research your answer (this builds credibility for your answer and also provides a way for the question asker to learn more on his/her own)

· Are formatted nicely

· Are spelled correctly

· Use standard capitalization (remember… ALL CAPS LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING )

· Abide by the QnA Code of Conduct

Katarina-QnA

As you may have noticed, we are continually growing our QnA community through marketing promotions and links from other MSN and Windows Live web sites, we have many new users coming in to ask questions to our loyal QnA community. As our QnA community is expanding, so is our product team. We’d like to introduce our newest member of the QnA program management team, Katarina.

Katarina-QnA, meet the QnA community and Community, meet Katarina-QnA! Here’s a bit more about Katarina in her own words:

Hi everyone!

I’m really happy and enthusiastic about joining the QnA team, especially since I’ve been on QnA since 2006 and now I finally have the chance to get even more involved with the site!

Prior to QnA, I worked on Windows Live Gallery and the Windows Live Toolbar web site. Community is important to me, so I also serve as the Programs Director on the Silicon Valley Women@Microsoft board (one of the diversity groups we have on campus), and am involved with recruiting , intern, and alumni events. Another perk with these community groups is all the free food that seems to be available. (This includes the QnA team, which generously provides Tuesday morning bagels, complete with a few different kinds of cream cheese spreads.)

Finally, I have a bunch of hobbies like eating and dancing but most noticeably, I’m a language dork and enjoy studying languages for fun and in hopes of future world travel.

Welcome aboard, Katarina, and welcome to all our new community members! And as usual, if you have feedback on this blog posting, please see our latest message board thread.

- Heather, Lead Program Manager, QnA

About QnA points...

Fri, 30 May 2008 02:45:47 GMT

As noted in our blog entry last week, when we launched the new-and-improved Live Search QnA site, we also changed the way points were awarded.

I know that points in general can get pretty controversial, and I've definitely heard the suggestion that we eliminate points altogether from QnA. I hope you understand that this blog post is not to revisit that specific topic, but rather to clarify what the recent changes were.

With that said, here's a summary of the current system - which you can also find referenced the help topic QnA point values and levels:

Activity	QnA Points Awarded
Asking a question	0
Answering a question	5
Signing into QnA (once per day)	1
Voting for an answer (including "No best answer" )	0
Voting for an answer that is chosen as best (including "No best answer")	4
Providing the answer that is chosen as best	20
Leaving a comment	0
Rating a QnA pair	1
Submitting an abuse report that's accepted	1
Submitting an abuse report that's not accepted	-1
Having content removed from the site for violating the Code of Conduct	-50

The items in bold maroon are the ones we changed in this last release.

Although we've spent countless hours debating and discussing the topic of points, by no means do we claim this current scheme to be perfect. It is what it is right now, and reflects our current thinking of how community members should be rewarded for their activities. It's about finding a balance. Personally, I happen to like the idea of rewarding extra points for voting for the answer that wins best answer, and none for voting in general. But I know that not everyone shares this sentiment. It's something we'll continue to study.

I was trying to think of an analogy in sports where the way points are awarded can be changed - so far I've seen some interesting answers. Without a doubt, points on QnA will continue to be controversial and with that in mind, the points system is subject to change in future releases. My hope is that every change we make moves us closer to having the perfect QnA.

Do you have any novel thoughts on how we should tweak points? Share your thoughts on this thread in the boards.

-Dennis, QnA Program Manager

Thanks for your feedback on our latest release

Fri, 23 May 2008 20:11:06 GMT

It’s been a little over three weeks since we launched the new-and-improved QnA site. The QnA team set up a message board thread and asked the community to provide feedback and suggestions there.

And boy, has the community responded!

Thank you for all of your valuable feedback. The QnA team has been listening and reading through your responses carefully, and we want to share a quick summary of what we’ve heard in addition to some responses.

Overall design: We know that the new design took a number of folks in our community by surprise. It was our intention to streamline basic QnA actions such as the sign-up process for creating a new Windows Live ID and QnA account as well as the process for asking a question. We also wanted to freshen up the look of the site and make it better match the rest of Live Search. Now that the re-design has been out there for a while, we realize that we have more improvements to make, and we will be making these improvements in our upcoming releases. There are a few key things we’ve heard here:

Make it easier to find the “questions” page
General design of the “view question” page – you’ve had many specific pieces of feedback here about what we can do to improve and tweak this updated design that we’ll be taking into consideration. Thanks for providing all the great input here.
“Your QnA” – Surface more information about the questions you asked and the answers you provided. We already fixed half of this issue – we once again indicate when you won Best answer. But many of you have asked us to make it easier to see when the questions you asked are in the voting phase. Because of your feedback, but we are looking into bringing this feature back in future release.
Font size – it has been interesting to read the feedback because some community members really like the larger font size while others do not.
Navigation in general – Make it easier to find questions that need answers or votes
Vertical scrolling – We’ve heard general feedback that the web pages require more vertical scrolling than they did before. And we agree. We’re looking at a few ways of improving this in a future release.

Points: There are a number of issues at play here…

First, for those of you who have been participating actively in our message board discussions, you know that there are many folks who suggest that we eliminate points altogether from QnA. This has been one of the most hotly debated topics in our Features & Support boards – long before our new release.
Second, is how we choose to award points for different activities on the site and what impact the recent changes we made to the points system will have on community behaviors and participation.
- We used to award 1 point simply for voting for best answer. And if the answer you picked ended up winning best answer, you received 4 more points. Under the new system, you no longer receive a point simply for voting. But you still get 4 points if you voted for the answer that ends up winning best answer.
- We were honestly surprised to see the negative feedback here because we felt this would solve a significant concern raised by many in the community: namely, “point chasers” not taking the time to read all the answers and really think about which one deserves to be awarded best answer.
Unfortunately we’re not sure that these issues are well understood in the community right now so we will be spending a blog post talking specifically about these changes soon just to make sure and clarify.

Top contributors: The goal of the Top Contributors feature was to begin highlighting members on the site who tend to contribute a good percentage of best answers in given tags to represent their areas of expertise. We wanted to start highlighting good answerers in the community who often go unrecognized and also push all of us who participate on QnA to start thinking about how we tag our questions and how we choose to answer questions, and to start thinking about areas and topics that we could each become “Top Contributors” in. Based on your feedback, we realize now that the name “Top Contributor” may be interpreted in different ways, and many of you have mentioned other good examples of contributions that could be recognized. We will consider improving this feature in the future.

Unique nicknames: This has been a point of debate since the inception of QnA. This issue is not a straightforward one because there are many users who do not do “harm” but share a similar name (such as all the various “lisa’s” or “david’s” that we have in our community who are great contributors). The idea of unique nicknames really assumes that there is more harm done than good around how a member selects his or her nickname in the community. With the improvements we’ve made in our moderation process, the impersonation problem really seems to have declined, so we’re continuing to monitor this situation to see how we want to address this issue moving forward.

Superstars page: There was some great feedback shared here in the message boards as well and while we’ve already addressed and adjusted our algorithms that compute our Superstars featured by “Reputation.” We still have some more refining and work to do here so we appreciate the input and suggestions.

So we thank you for your continued feedback, and for continuing to use QnA! Please know that the team actively reads this thread and makes note of suggestions offered.

Until next time…

-QnA Team

Life of a Program Manager, Part 1

Fri, 16 May 2008 20:58:19 GMT

Hello, world! Nate here, writing my first blog post for the QnA team!

Mother’s Day was a week or so back, but thanks to the community, I didn’t miss this very important holiday and even got a few interesting ideas on how to make the day special.

We’ve all been very busy here with the new release and working on making the future of QnA even better. As we’ve been going through this, some of you have asked what exactly it is that we do. The four of us you’ve met so far—David, Heather, Dennis, and I—are program managers at Microsoft, on the Live Search team. Today, we’d like to share with you a little bit about our role and how we work to make QnA a better place!

Program managers, often abbreviated as PMs, are one of the three disciplines at Microsoft that focus on the software development lifecycle—developers, test engineers, and program managers. Together, these folks unite, get behind a project, make good stuff like our latest QnA release happen, and keep QnA up and operational 24/7.

At other technology organizations, Microsoft program management spans a little bit each of what is called product management, project management, and product marketing. It’s a multi-disciplinary role that touches every step of the product cycle. Over the course of a release, PMs act as the glue that keeps things together. Working with lots of other folks, they do the following on the QnA team:

· Customer and competitive research on how to make our site look better, work better, and keep folks happier

· Plan and flesh out those features

· Participate in the community of Live Search QnA

· Manage schedules and deadlines to release improvements in a timely fashion

· Moderate the site only when absolutely necessary (it’s not our day job, but we do serve as the last line of defense in making our community a safe and productive place to be)

A Day in the Life: the Planning Phase

Right now, we’re focused on ideas. Ideas come from all over the place and at any time of day. In gathering ideas and figuring out our future feature directions, we draw insights from other team members, our partners, our marketing team, and not least of all you, our dear users!

Before we dive in to designing new features, we first dig deep in to the QnA website and message boards. We draw insights in to the problems our product currently solves and currently fails to solve. This means focusing hard on how we use our own product, what users say about our product, how markets react to our product, and how folks use the site as our metrics measure it. At the end of the day, features should solve some fundamental problem for our business and our customers, and it is our goal to understand that problem.

Understanding the heart of the problem involves a lot of research, thought, and some intuition. For me, this has meant a lot of reading, a hearty amount of thought and consideration on your feedback, and quite a lot of discussions with folks on lots of teams. We organize all this information together, and we think through high-level issues customers face. Once these scenarios become apparent, we begin brainstorming appropriate solutions.

This may sound simple, but it can be a lot of work. Figuring out where our product should go isn’t easy. There are tons of different directions QnA could go; our dreams are infinite, but our time and resources, unfortunately, are not. We have to balance demands from our customers and partners, demands from our core business and company division, and limitations of our processes and technology. Balancing these separate needs requires us to understand and reconcile all these different perspectives.

Eventually, we develop our plans and our understanding of the product and market into detailed feature specifications …but that’s a story for another time!

Ideas? Thoughts? Now is the time to let us know so we can work together to make Live Search QnA even better with our next release! Please post your feedback in the message boards.

What is a Top Contributor?

Tue, 06 May 2008 02:40:39 GMT

One of the new features we've introduced in this latest release of QnA is the designation of Top Contributor. And many QnA members have been asking what it's all about. For example, Karin Bartsch asked:

What would make me a "Top Contributor?" Are there any fixed criteria to reach?
I would construct questions to be a crowd pleaser, but is that right? When we have Windows Search engine in mind, we should stick to concrete questions, right?

It's certainly interesting and enlightening to see how QnA members, such as Karin Bartsch, are interpreting the new features. Misunderstandings are certainly the fault of the QnA team -- and we do realize that we need to do a better job with communicating the meaning behind all of the features. I'll explain the Top Contributor feature in this blog post.

First of all, you should know that Top Contributor is really a short way of saying Top Contributor in a Tag. So when you see a member's avatar with the Top Contributor banner across the top, please remember that that's short-hand for Top Contributor in a Tag. Also, Top Contributor is all about answering questions on QnA and has nothing to do with the questions you ask.

Before I continue, let me point out that you can learn about the Top Contributor feature in this help topic: View your key statistics and improve your ranking. Here's an excerpt of what you'll see there:

Top Contributor: Top Contributors are people who've provided a high proportion of Best Answers for questions associated with one of the most popular tags. Top contributors have the Top Contributor banner over their avatar (A display picture that you can personalize and change to express your personality.). To become a Top Contributor, search for questions with a particular tag, and then provide the most detailed and useful answers that you can. For more information, see Find questions. Before you can become a Top Contributor, your Reputation must be above a certain level.

By the way, you can learn about all (or at least most) of the new features in the QnA help topics. The Help link is at the bottom of every QnA page.

There are also lots of contextual help links throughout the site. For example, when you see the module "Meet a Top Contributor in This Tag" you can click on the link that says What is a Top Contributor?

And when you see the "Key statistics" module on "Your QnA" or another member's public profile page, you can click on the link that says Learn more.

So, back to my own personal explanation of Top Contributor...

Top Contributors are not selected by anybody on the QnA team; they are selected automatically by an algorithm (formula) that makes a calculation behind the scenes. The calculation takes place at certain time intervals, so you may notice that a certain member is a Top Contributor in a given tag on one day but not on another day. This is because that person no longer met the criteria.

I can't reveal the actual formula -- however, the key to becoming a Top Contributor in a Tag is to provide lots of quality answers to questions associated with that tag. It also has to do with the quality of the answers you provide in general across QnA.

Remember, Top Contributor in a Tag does not have anything to do with the questions you ask, the comments you leave, or the votes you make. It's all about your answers -- both to questions associated with a particular tag and to all questions across the site.

Any particular QnA member is eligible to be designated a Top Contributor in up to five tags. For example, we have a member with the nickname Message who was selected by the algorithm as a Top Contributor in three tags: msn, messenger, and windows live messenger. This means, for example, that this member provided answers to a certain number of questions tagged windows live messenger. A certain percentage of those answers may have been selected as best answers. It also means that this member provided a certain quantity and quality of answers in general across all of QnA (not necessarily associated with the tag windows live messenger). Because the Top Contributor calculation is made repeatedly over time, it's possible that one day Message will see that she or he is no longer a Top Contributor in windows live messenger.

Top Contributors are designated for the most popular tags on the QnA site (approximately 200 of them at the time of this writing). Most popular means that members used these tags the most when asking their questions. For each of these tags, there can be one, two, or three Top Contributors. When you visit the tag page, you'll see just one "Meet a Top Contributor in This Tag" module on the page. This does not mean that this is the only Top Contributor in this tag. When you visit the same tag page at another time, you may see another member highlighted as a Top Contributor in that tag. There is a random and periodic rotation of this module on any given tag page.

We do not have a page at this time where you can view all of the Top Contributors in one place. And we do know that that would be a good idea for us to create such a page!

I'm sure you understand why I can't be more specific about the formula -- that would make it super easy for people to cheat and game the system. And, of course, we don't want that. We want the Top Contributor designation to mean something real -- to be an accurate representation of a member's answer contributions in a certain tag.

In the end, it's all about providing a clue as to the trustworthiness and accuracy of an answer. For example, if I ask a question about cars, and I get an answer from Literally Speaking, and I see that this member is a Top Contributor in the tag cars -- well, I'm more likely to trust his answer. It's just another way to make QnA more helpful to those asking questions. And, on the flip side, it's a way to reward members for providing quality answers in their area of expertise.

I would like to point out that -- as of this writing -- Literally Speaking is indeed a Top Contributor in the tag cars. I'm going to share a little trick, which you might find useful. Here are the search results for all of the questions tagged cars that were answered by Literally Speaking:

http://qna.live.com/Search.aspx?q=Meta%3Asearch.aauthor%286F6E9BD36AB340929D8DCA8C20B064E6%29+AND+tag%3Acars&go=&form=QB

The way I got those results was by typing in the following meta search in the QnA search box:

Meta:search.aauthor(6F6E9BD36AB340929D8DCA8C20B064E6) AND tag:beauty

The long number inside the parentheses is the User ID of Literally Speaking, which you can see in the URL of Literally Speaking's public profile page:

http://qna.live.com/ShowUser.aspx?uid=6F6E9BD36AB340929D8DCA8C20B064E6

Now that you know this advanced search technique, you can make your own queries by substituting any user's ID and include any tag. By the way, you can search for questions associated with a given tag by doing the following searches:

Type tag:gardening in the search box -- this will give you all questions tagged gardening
Type tag:"internet explorer" in the search box -- this will give you all questions tagged internet explorer
If you type tag:internet explorer in the search box (meaning you forgot to include the quotation marks) -- this will give you all questions tagged internet that also have the word explorer somewhere on the question page

I should probably point out here that the Top Contributor designation is not directly tied to being a Superstar. You're likely to see Superstars who are Top Contributors in certain tags. And you're also likely to see Superstars who are not Top Contributors in any tags.

Well, hopefully this answers your questions about Top Contributor and what it's all about.

As you know, QnA is a beta site, which means that it's still a work in progress. A feature like Top Contributor is one of those features that will need to be adjusted and fine-tuned over time. So please be patient if you notice that a Top Contributor designation doesn't seem to make sense. By all means, tell us about it. But please do understand that this isn't going to be perfect out of the gate.

Please funnel any other questions or feedback about the QnA site to the following message board thread:

Your feedback and questions about the new-and-improved QnA

Thanks for your continued interest in QnA. Now go out there and explore questions by tag or do those tag searches to find questions in your areas of expertise, and become Top Contributors in Tags!

-DavidB, QnA Program Manager