Live QnA

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

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

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

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:

1. Questions/content disappearing & then re-appearing on the QnA site.
2. Votes occasionally appear to "not stick."
3. 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.
4. 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

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