The Quomon Blog

Well, actually it isn’t completely over here in Barcelona, but at least our low profile this last month on the blog is over.

We’ve mainly been working on background functionality that makes it easier for us to administrate the system. This includes making it automatic that old open questions receive a reminder to close them and also the process of closing it by the administrators has been made easier.

Also we have begun cleaning up the categories and joining categories and their synonyms. This means that e-mail and email will be the same category, even if the users don’t agree completely on how to spell it. We hope that this will make the choice of categories easier and also that our experts knowledge will be easier to detect, not dividing it between different categories meaning the same.

If you notice any categories that need to be joined, please let us know.

Have a good weekend,

David

Finally we’ve implemented something that has been on our minds (and todo-list) for quite a while: a site-wide search option.

From any page on the site you can now search directly for new questions, existing solutions and experts. The search box and button are placed in the top right corner of the website. This also means that we’ve taken away the specific search boxes on the Answer questions, Browse questions and expert search pages, since the new one replaced those.

Apart from that we’ve also added the possibility of managing which sites you want your user profile to be active on. Right now we have the english site, quomon.com, and the spanish, quomon.es, and until now depending on the site you signed up on and the languages you chose your profile would be accesible on the relevant sites. From now on you have to manage this separately from the languages you speak.

This can be found when you are logged in, in the Account Options in the submenu on top. Under the “Site Activation” header you can see where your profile currently is active, and you can add more sites if you wish to. You should not add your profile to sites, which languages you don’t speak though.

Hopefully these new features are well received by you all.

Kind regards,

David Givoni

This week we’ve made some small adjustments based on your feedback.

The first is that in the text fields when you ask a new question or answer a question, you can now use the TAB key to actually tabulate the text. It will not move as normal to the next element on the page, but instead indent the text where you’re typing. We believe that this will help the readability of especially code examples.

We’ve also changed the look of the ask question page a little bit and added better explanations of what the different input fields means. We hope that this will help our users write better questions, which in turn will be easier for our experts to answer.

This is all for now, as always let us know if you have more suggestions to make Quomon better.

All the best,

David

As requested  by some of you we have enhanced the experts profile page.

We have added the option to see all questions answered and asked by the expert as well as all the questions that he/she wrote summaries for.

This means that people searching for experts will have a better idea of how you actually interact with the other users helping solving their questions.

We hope that this will help exposure our experts to potential employment or contracting oportunities.

/David Givoni

Today we’ve added a little something to the site to make it easier for you experts to find answers to respond to.

Each list, like the “Recently Active Questions” on the Answer Question page, or the “Recent Solutions” list on the Browse Question page, now has a “View All” link in the top right header of the list. Clicking on that takes you to a view of all questions corresponding to the list type, so that it is now possible to see more than only the first 5 of each list.

This has been requested from some of you experts and we’ve been wanting to add this for a while.

So now you can go through those old questions that never have received an answer to see if you know the solution and thereby can help a fellow user out and earn some more points. But you gotta be quick, before somebody else does it before you.

Let me know what you think,
David

You might have noticed that lately we have been going through all the older open questions, inviting the user that asked the question to either close it or state that he is still looking for a solution to his problem.

This was becoming a larger problem since traffic is growing and some experts were unhappy that they weren’t rewarded for their (sometimes very extensive) answers with the points they truly deserve.

The steps that we’ve implemented are the following:
- if a user asked a question and did receive and answer or comment to it, but didn’t not react on that, we send an automatic email out after three days and we keep sending reminders out during three weeks.
- on the user home page you will receive a red-lettered reminder to close your questions, if they have been open for a while.
- on the question page itself, we also show a mesage to the user urging him/her to close the question, if it has received answers.
- we go through older questions and post an admin comment to get the user to close the question.
- if the old open questions are not closed by the user, the admin does it and distributes the points to the experts involved in the discussion. This might not be as good a distribution or as good a solution as if the user himself chose the solution to his problem, but we find it necessary so that the experts on the site are motivated to give answers.

On a side note, if you’re an expert looking for points you might want to take note here. One of our recently very active experts, nidhi, has managed to get to the top of the expert ranking by answering also older questions, that have been open for long. We still have a few older questions, that need answers, so maybe it’s worth it to go through them and see if you have the right solution?

We hope that you agree that these measures were necessary and we would like to know if you think that we should take other steps as well.

Have a good day,
David

Finally we’ve taken the time to get our own Quomon blog up. We’ve been sending out very infrequent newsletters and just been too busy working on the system to get this blog started, but now we’re here, online and communicating

We will use the blog as the main communication channel to report on the development progress of Quomon and also to get a better dialog with our users about new ideas, critique and feedback in general. So anything you want to tell us about Quomon, please post a comment here on the blog or send us an email with your opinion. We’re all ears.

In fact we already have a list of more than 100 good ideas on our to-do-list that we want to implement, but it takes time and we also need to know what you, our users, think is most important.

I should also introduce myself, since I will probably be the main blogger here in the beginning. I’m David Givoni, one of the founders of Quomon and I lead the development of the site. I’m 35 years old, originally Danish, but now enjoying life in Barcelona, Spain.

Good day to all of you,

David