Live QnA: QnA Help

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

Posting links within your questions and answers

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:24:01 GMT

Okay, here’s a question I’ve seen some of you asking: Can we use links within our QnA postings? There’s been a little confusion recently surrounding this issue, and I’m here to set the record straight.

The short answer is YES. You can indeed use links within your answers, comments, and even your question details.

Before I proceed with more information, I must say up front that you are not allowed to post links to external sites that violate the QnA Code of Conduct.

Including links in your answer

In fact, we encourage you to provide links to support your answer. If you found the answer on one or several websites, it’s very helpful to the person who asked the question to visit those sites and see for themselves (and to get more info if they want).

I think it’s also really cool when users help others by explaining just how they searched to find their answer. Let’s look at an actual example. Here’s a question I just came across last night posted by Gwen: Is there a computer dictionary out there? You can check out the question and see my answer (I’m david-qna). But I’ll also include my answer right here:

There are quite a few online computer dictionaries out there. I found a bunch by doing a Live Search for computer dictionary. You can see my search results by clicking this link:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=computer+dictionary&go=Search&form=QBRE

I think http://www.webopedia.com/ looks particularly good and trustworthy.

As you can see, I included a link to my search results, and maybe this will help Gwen learn how to do searches on her own in the future. I also put in a direct link to the online computer dictionary that looked best to me.

So these are examples of how you can put links to great use in an answer.

Including links in your question details

When you are asking a question on QnA, you might want to include links in the "question details" section (the part that shows up under the main part of your question). You may want to do this to show what you found on your own. Or maybe you want to reference a website that presents a certain point of view and that’s what your question is about.

Here’s an example of a question I just posted in which I included a bunch of links: Does Warren Buffet approve of the controversial sales techniques used by Kirby to sell vacuums?

Even if you type a full web address in the first part of your question (the first question entry box that allows just 100 characters), it won’t be clickable. That’s because that part of your question itself becomes a link to the actual question. So I don’t recommend including full web addresses in the main question area. If your question is about a web site, by all means, write the name of the site (like amazon.com for example). But don’t write the entire URL (http://www.amazon.com).

Examples:

Good: What do you think of the website amazon.com?

Not so good: What do you think of the website http://www.amazon.com? (Okay... not the best example because the Spaces blog tool here just made that a link! But it wouldn't be a link if you tried this in QnA.)

Including links in your comments

You can also include links in your comments. I won’t give an example of this. But I can imagine times when you might want to explain yourself in a comment by providing a link to a site that backs up what you’re saying or further clarifies the issue.

How to include links

Here’s a great Q and A about how to create links in your question details or answer: Should the ability to add hyperlinks be added to QnA?

Why should I explain when Jason has already provided a great answer! Thanks Jason! Nice job.

The potential danger of clicking links

Now, just to be thorough, I should mention that not all links are safe. And it becomes especially risky when those links are posted by the general public (be it on QnA, a personal blog, an individual’s website, etc.). I know our wonderful QnA MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) Ron Chamberlin thinks along those lines… and he should know because he’s involved in computer security. Ron says that he finds it not a good thing to just open any link, and he has written: “Just because a link says youtube, ya don’t really know, and I would hate to see your pc fry because of a malformed link.” Wise words indeed.

Here are a couple of interesting articles about the safety of web links:

· McAfee: Search results can be dangerous

· BrowserShield: Helping Make the Web Safe for Surfers (so there's more hope on the horizon)

Just to make it clear, it is against the QnA Code of Conduct to post links that could harm or disrupt another user's computer. And this includes dangerous links. But, you, as a user of QnA, are responsible for protecting your own computer system, and I wanted to let you know about the potential danger of links. I also want you to know that the QnA team is not responsible for the content or activities in any user-created content.

All in all, I just wanted to try to clear up the general question of whether or not you’re allowed to include links in your QnA postings. Again, the answer is YES. I hope I’ve helped!

-DavidB, QnA Program Manager

What we learned about QnA

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:05:50 GMT

Hello QnA-ers,

And a farewell to our summer campaign to share tips with new folks and pass along some reminders for the long-time QnAers. At the risk of sounding like a school teacher who drove you crazy, let’s review, shall we?

First, a hearty thanks to those who have taken the time to share thoughts about QnA and the blog posts. The community grows and benefits not only from good questions and answers, but also from good communication between the QnA team and the QnAers.

We hope everyone’s learned a little something about using QnA.

As a quick reminder, we’ve covered:

· Searching and Navigation — How to easily find what you want

· QnA Alerts — A handy way to learn, via Live Messenger or e-mail, when questions, answers, and comments that interest you have changed

· Using Tags — To help people find your questions

· Answers — How to provide informative, considerate responses

· Questions— Suggestions to get everyone’s attention… and some good answers

Having looked back, it makes sense to look ahead a little, too. We are reading your responses to the blog, your observations and suggestions in the message boards, and your comments in QnA. We enjoy and appreciate the interaction, and you can expect to see the QnA team taking an active, engaged role in the community. Beyond that, your contributions will have an impact in the form of new QnA features and enhancements.

Thank you again for your contributions to a lively, fast-growing community. We look forward to lots more terrific questions and answers, to interacting more with community members so QnA keeps improving, and to having fun along the way.

-LindaW, QnA Program Manager

How to search and navigate on QnA

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 05:33:09 GMT

Hi QnAers,

A key aspect of QnA is finding the content that interests you. But there's so much information on QnA. How do you search and browse the wealth of community knowledge?

Well, let me count the ways….

1. Browse by Tags

Tags are an interesting new tool in the Web world. Per Wikipeida, “A tag is a (relevant) keyword or terms associated with or assigned to a piece of information, thus describing the item and enabling the keyword-based classification of information.” Wow, that’s a mouthful! Here’s another, per Technorati (a geeky blog site), “Tags are labels that people use to make it easier to find blog posts, photos and videos that are related.”

Thus, QnA Tags help you find QnA information that is related to the tag you choose.

Example: I want to find out how to run a small business

You have two options to find the appropriate content.

Option 1
Step 1: In the search box at the top of the page, type small business
Step 2: On the left-hand side of the next page, you’ll see a section titled Related Tags. And at the top of this section, you should see a link titled small business. Click the small business link and you’ll be taken to a page showing you all of the past and present questions tagged with the phrase small business.
Option 2
Step 1: Click Browse tags on the left-hand side of the QnA homepage
Step 2: Scan the list of popular tags and, after the more general Business tag, you'll see the small business tag. Click the small business link and you'll be taken to a page showing you all of the past and present questions tagged with the phrase small business.

2. Using RSS Feeds

Now, as much we’d all love to interact on QnA all day long, we need tools that help us keep current on the information from all our fellow QnAers when we're not on QnA. The RSS tool is a great way to do that. RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication."

Example: I’d like to keep up with all new questions tagged marketing

· Go to the page showing all questions tagged marketing (see above about how to do this)

· On the upper right-hand corner, click on “RSS” (it appears in white lettering in a little orange box)

· If you already have an RSS Reader, click on “Subscribe to this feed”

· If you do not have an RSS Reader, click on “Learn more about feeds"

3. Advanced Searches

The Search box sits on the top of all QnA pages; it allows quick and easy searches of keywords found in Questions, Answers, and Tags.

Example: I want to find about New York City

· On any search box in QnA, type: new york city (the search box is not case sensitive, which means you can type everything in lower-case letters)

· All questions, answers, and tags show up if any of the words, “New,” “York,” or “City” are found

· To limit it to the exact phrase, type “new york city" (include the quotation marks -- this tells the search engine that you want the exact and complete phrase)

· To find only questions that are tagged “New York City,” type the following in the search box (this is obviously an advanced search method!): meta:search.tag("new york city")

Enjoy the QnA Experience and, as always, the team’s ears are open to new suggestions, hints, and tricks that work for you and your information. Feel free to add you comments below!

~LindaW, QnA Program Manager

The power of QnA alerts!

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:27:21 GMT

Hi Fellow QnA-ers!

I hope you've been checking out DavidB’s recent blog entries focusing on questions, answers, and tags. Those articles are chock-full of helpful information. Today, I'm going to dive in and tell you all about a powerful tool that's at your disposal... a tool that can help you focus on the things that are important to you on QnA. What is this tool, you ask? Well, it's Windows Live Alerts (from now on, I'll simply say Alerts or QnA alerts).

Welcome to the fourth installment of our summer educational blog campaign!

Ever since we were young, we’ve asked questions and received answers. But in today’s information-intensive age, how do you manage all of this talk and information? How do you keep up? Technology is the powerful driver and QnA alerts is the tool that can help you manage the influx of information. An “alert” is a notification that is sent to you when certain content is added or changed. At QnA, it notifies you when questions, answers, and comments that interest you have changed. It works like a robot that constantly pays attention to the information when you mark “alert me” and then automatically sends you updates as they happen.

The following are the basics you’ll need to get started. We’ve also added suggestions from some of our power Alerts users.

How do I sign up for Alerts?

1. Go to Your QnA page (sign in if you haven't already done so) and click Sign up for Alerts.

2. You will be redirected to the Alerts sign-up page.

3. Review and accept the agreements by clicking I accept

4. Next you’ll be asked “Where do you want your QnA alerts delivered?” Under the Basic Delivery tab you can choose to have your alerts sent to your Windows Live Messenger (if you don’t have Messenger, you can follow the link to download and install it) and/or your e-mail inbox. Make your selection by checking the appropriate checkbox(es). Or click the Custom Delivery tab to select from more advanced delivery options.

5. Click Finish

How do I edit or delete my Alerts?

1. Go to Your QnA page

2. Click on the Alerts tab

3. Edit delivery settings or delete the Alerts that you no longer want to receive

How will my Alerts notify me?

The alerts you ‘subscribe’ to will be sent either to your Windows Live Messenger account or to your e-mail account (depending on what you chose when you signed up or last edited your Alerts delivery settings). Each alert is a message containing a link that takes you to the updated content.

How do I use Alerts?

Here are some great suggestions from our power users:

Follow your favorite tag:

1. Click Browse tags to find a whole bunch of tags from which to choose, or look at any question and you'll see tags underneath the question

2. Click on the tag. This takes you to a page showing all of the content that has been marked with that tag.

3. Click Alert me on the upper right-hand part of the page

4. When successful, Alert me will change to Subscribed to alerts

5. Now you’ll be notified whenever new content is posted using your selected tag

Stay connected with your QnA friends by subscribing to a user alert:

1. Click on your favorite User (perhaps Live QnA Team?!!)

2. Click Alert me on the upper right-hand part of the page

3. When successful, Alert me will change to Subscribed to alerts

4. Now you’ll be notified whenever this user posts new content

See all the updates to a question you’ve asked or answered or to any other question:

1. Click on the question for which you want an answer

2. Click Alert me on the upper right-hand part of the page

3. When successful, Alert me will change to Subscribed to alerts

4. Now you’ll be notified whenever this question receives a new answer or comment

I hope you can see how Alerts are a great way to keep up with the ever-changing content on QnA!

Please let me know if you have any other other useful tips and tricks regarding Alerts by commenting below. I'd love to hear how you all keep up with the content that interests you on QnA.

-LindaW, QnA Program Manager

All about tags!

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:12:28 GMT

Hi folks,

For this third installment of our summer series of educational blogs, I thought I’d talk a bit about tags. When you ask a question on QnA, you are required to add one or more tags to your question. But some of you may be asking…

· Why do I need to tag my questions?

· What is a tag anyway?

· How do I choose the best tags?

· How do I add tags to my question?

· How can I help improve the tagging system?

· How do other users find my questions by using tags?

I’m going to answer these questions here.

1. Why do I need to tag my questions?

The whole purpose of tags is to help other users find your question. Because tags are such an important piece of the QnA puzzle, they are a requirement in the question-posting process.

2. What is a tag anyway?

A tag is a word or short phrase that describes something – in the case of QnA, it describes your question. Some websites call them “keywords” or “labels” instead of tags.

Here’s what I keep in mind when coming up with my tags: What words or phrases might other people use when searching on QnA that I hope will lead them to my question?

Using this as my guide, I enter as many appropriate tags as possible. My aim is to be thorough, thoughtful, and strategic with my tags. I recommend you do the same because good tags can be the key to getting good answers. Again, tags help other users find your question, and people need to find your question in order to answer it!

3. How do I choose the best tags?

I think this is best answered by looking at an example:

Q: How many pounds of fish do dolphins typically eat in a day?

(click the preceding link to see my actual question on QnA)

The following tags are appropriate for this question:

dolphins, marine mammals, fish, animals, biology, food, fact, trivia

As you can see, a tag can describe both specific (dolphins) and general (biology) content in your question. It can also describe the type of question you ask. For example, some types of questions fall under: trivia, advice, how to, opinion, fact.

Remember, the key thing to keep in mind when coming up with your tags is: What words or phrases are other folks likely to use when searching for this kind of question on QnA?

The best tagged questions have more than one tag. Using more than three tags gives you a better chance of getting great answers.

Use broad tags such as, technology, health, or gardening, to make sure that your question is grouped together with other similar questions. Then use more specific tags to help people find the details of your question.

More important than the number of tags you use is accuracy and popularity. You should make sure to use tags that are accurate and apply to your question. Inaccurate tags can result in your question receiving poor answers.

I’ve seen some users on QnA include tag phrases that are not going to be effective in helping other folks find their questions. Here are some examples:

· hi there pretty lady

· sing campfire songs

· will somebody help me

It’s not likely that other users will enter these exact phrases when searching for questions on QnA. These types of tags are not meeting the purpose of tags – helping other users find your question. So try to come up with words or phrases that other folks are likely to use as their search terms.

4. How do I add tags to my question?

After you’ve typed your question (and the optional question details) and hit Continue, you will encounter the “Tag your question” step. You will see a box into which you can enter your own text. This is where you type your own tags.

You may also see a number of tag choices with checkboxes next to them. These are tags that QnA has automatically generated based on the words you used in your question. They are just suggestions. Sometimes these auto-generated tags are good choices; sometimes they’re not (actually the QnA automatic tagging system learns from every community member and gets smarter over time).

Check off any of the suggested tags that you believe are appropriate. (Do not check the tags that are not appropriate!)

Most of the time, the suggested tags will not be enough and you will want to enter your own tags. That’s what the text box is for.

In the Tag your question box, type a word or short phrase that you think best describes your question and click the Add button.
It’s very important to note that you must add one tag (word or phrase) at a time. In other words, you must type the word or phrase then click Add; then type the next word or phrase and click Add again; etc.
Keep adding tags until you’ve added all the important tags you want for your question and then click Submit.

Remember, the more good tags you use, the smarter the QnA automatic tagging system will get!

For those of you who are interested in a more specific example, here’s the step-by-step process for tagging the question: How many pounds of fish do dolphins eat in a day?
In this case, QnA suggests the following tags:

Family

People

Fun

life

travel

This is a case where I don’t think any of those suggested tags are appropriate (again, the system isn’t perfect!). So I’m going to leave all of those checkboxes unchecked, and I will proceed to enter my own tags as follows:

Type dolphins à click Add

Type marine mammals à click Add

Type fish à click Add

Type animals à click Add

Type biology à click Add

Type food à click Add

Type fact à click Add

Type trivia à click Add

Click Submit

Now this may seem like a lot of steps. But it’s really quite easy and you can do it quite quickly.
Please note: capitalizing letters is not necessary when typing tags (using all lower-case letters is fine).

Again, the benefit of entering as many key words and phrases as possible is that you increase the likelihood that other users will find your question, which means you have a much better chance of getting good answers!

5. How can I help improve the tagging system?

The tagging system is yours to shape. You have the power to create your own tags to better your chances at getting great answers to your questions. If you’re not sure whether you're using a good tag, try it anyway. And if you see someone whose question probably belongs in different tags, don't hesitate to politely tell them. By helping everyone else get their questions answered, you can contribute to creating a storehouse of knowledge that everyone can learn from.

6. How do I find questions by using tags?

How to find content within QnA is really a subject for another blog posting. But I just want to give you a few tips here, so you can see how proper tagging can really help other users find your questions.

Here are various methods for finding content using tags:

Find a question that interests you (perhaps by browsing through the list of open questions). Click on a tag beneath that question. This shows you other questions that have been tagged with the same word or phrase.

Visit the browse tags page to find tags of interest

Click any of the popular tags that are highlighted on the QnA homepage

Click on the popular and featured tags on the QnA Questions page

To search for content that has a particular tag, enter the following in the search box on top of any QnA page:

tag: [word or phrase here]

To find all questions tagged with the word cameras

Type this in the search box:

tag: cameras

(click the preceding link to see this tag search in action)

Click the Search button

To find all questions tagged with the phrase digital cameras;

Type this in the search box:

tag: “digital camera”

(click the preceding link to see this tag search in action)

Note: The quotation marks tell the search engine you want the complete phrase digital camera and not just the word digital or the word camera.

Click the Search button

We’ll have more about how to search for content on QnA using tags and other methods in a future blog post. For now, though, I hope this has been a useful explanation of tags!

As always, please share any other tips you may have in the comments section below.

Happy tagging!

-DavidB, QnA Program Manager

Time to meet "A" (a.k.a. How to write good answers)

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:17:21 GMT

Hi again folks,

Welcome to the second in our summer series of educational QnA blogs. Last week, I gave you some tips on how to write good questions. Today, it’s time to meet “A,” the Answers part of QnA.

So, how do you write a good answer?

1. Be honest, thorough, and straightforward

As your mother always said “honesty is the best policy.” Well, I’d say that’s true for answers on QnA as well. If the person asking the question is looking for opinions, an honest answer is the best answer. Tell them what you really think. When somebody is in search of facts, give them the facts… if you’re providing an answer that’s off the top of your head (in other words, you didn’t research it), that’s okay, but it’s nice to include that detail in your answer (the fact that you didn’t look it up). It’s even better though, to look it up and provide your sources in your answer (see #3 below).

Being thorough is always good. A full and thoughtful answer is likely to be a good answer. Don’t skimp on the details in your answer. One-word answers are almost never sufficient.

Communicating via the written word can easily lead to misunderstandings. When you have a conversation with somebody in person, there are all sorts of cues that help you understand where the person is coming from – the tone of their voice, the look in their eyes, facial and body expressions, etc. With QnA, these types of cues are replaced by vocabulary (the words you choose), grammar, punctuation, and formatting. So by being straightforward with your communication, you have much higher odds of being properly understood.

Now, more about the issue of formatting…

2. Format your answers nicely

A well-formatted question is easier to read, easier to understand, and more likely to be appreciated by others. Nobody likes reading long blocks of text that have no line breaks. So be sure to create blank lines in between paragraphs by hitting the Enter key twice (you need to hit it twice to create the blank line).

3. Don’t use ALL CAPS

I mentioned this in last week’s blog posting on how to write good questions, and it applies here as well: don’t use ALL CAPS when composing your answer. Words with all capital letters can be more difficult to read and many people consider it tantamount to shouting.

Since last week’s posting, I have learned that we have some QnAers who purposely use all caps because their eyesight is not the best and they find all caps easier to see. That makes sense. But, if you fall into this category, there are a couple of solutions that can make the text on QnA (and all websites) easier for you to read while at the same time avoiding the “ALL CAPS = shouting” problem. Many folks don't know this... but you can zoom in on web pages, and you can increase the text size on web pages.

If you don't have Internet Explorer 7 (the latest version), I recommend that you do so. It's free, and Microsoft made a lot of improvements since Internet Explorer 6 (one big thing: it's much more secure). You can download Internet Explorer 7 here.

4. Use spell checker

Here’s another tip from last week that’s relevant once again: Use the spell checker before submitting your answers! You’ll probably notice that, when voting for Best Answer, most people are likely to vote for the answer that is not only most informative, but most grammatically correct as well.

5. Provide sources/references

This is especially helpful for factual questions – providing sources and references for more information. In many cases, the best way to find an answer is to research the question on the Web (and we hope you use Live Search!). It’s great to get in the habit of providing links to the sites where you found your answer. However, I must say that it’s not considered a best practice to just past a link to a website as your answer. It’s better form to write something like this:

Hi Mary, I think the best place for you to search for recipes is on Live Search:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=cookie+recipes&src=IE-SearchBox

It can also be very helpful to explain to the asker how you did your search (e.g. I went to Live Search and put in the search terms: garmin nuvi 350 vs. nuvi 200).

To include a link to a website in your answer, simply type the entire URL (or copy and paste it). For example, www.live.com or http://maps.live.com/. You don’t need to have any HTML skills!

One word of warning: please make sure the site you link to does not violate the QnA Code of Conduct.

Those are some basic tips on how to write good answers on QnA. If you have any other tips, please share them by commenting on this blog post.

Thanks, and happy answering!

-DavidB, QnA Program Manager