Quick Release 11-19-09

Preview: Now you can preview your questions, answers and comments before you post them. This was our single most popular request from our users. Thanks for the feedback!

Return to place after login: We fixed this annoying issue so now you’ll return to where you started after logging in.

 

Questionland Experts Launches

The Stranger has launched Questionland Experts. It’s a place where the community can ask experts questions – you get answers from the professionals.

The Q&A is topical and relevant, and what could be more relevant than Thanksgiving – the starting topic. You get to ask local chefs how to solve your problems, or get ideas for new side dishes, or alternatives to turkey, or doing something healthy. Avoid that dry turkey this thanksgiving, or try something new. Have fun.

Release 11/12/09

• Email Notifications to Featured Contributors: Featured Contributors will receive email notifications of all questions asked in their category. This is essential in YouSaidIt’s expert Q&A sites where featured contributors are sometimes the only people allowed to answer questions. The sooner they know about the questions the sooner they’ll get answered.
• Change Username for Facebook accounts: Now you can change your YouSaidIt username when logging in with your Facebook account. Some people don’t want to use their real name on certain Q&A sites.
• Add users to multiple sites (Admin only): Now admins can add users to new sites that already exist in other sites. This only applies to accounts that have multiple sites with a shared user-base.

Q&A is big and profitable.

ReadWriteWeb posted about the success of Answers.com today. They are growing rapidly and profitable which is great, but where is it all coming from? WikiAnswers is the answer.

On a separate note PaidContent posted about Sharecare, a health Q&A launching with some great expert content from Dr. Oz and a team he is assembling.

Q&A is big business. But RWW raises an important issue: How good is the content? At these mega sites it may be questionable (pun intended). We think that the content will be better when Q&A is integrated into site content and their communities.

UGC is gradually moving in the direction of Social Content which is far more relevant and valuable. That’s why we provide Social Q&A for communities with expert content.

Questionland Boise is live!

The latest city to join Questionland is Boise. The Boise Weekly, some of the nicest and coolest people have launched: You Ask. Boise Answers. So go ahead and ask.

You can also ask questions in Seattle at The Stranger and Portland at The Portland Mercury. We’ll be announcing new cities as they join… and remember there can be only ONE (Questionland is limited to 1 per city and um… you won’t get that reference unless you know the film. Do you?).

Release 10-27-09 (Moderation and more…)

NEW MODERATION FEATURES

• Moderation Threshhold: Now moderators can set a threshhold for reported posts and will be emailed when a post is reported over the threshhold (default is 3 times). You can also set “Auto-Reject” to have posts automatically rejected and removed from the site when they’re reported over the threshhold.
• Improved Reported Posts List: Way better display of posts that have been reported. Rejected posts can be filtered out and posts are only displayed once with info on each time they were reported (date and by whom).

OTHER

• Added # of Answers to Questions RSS feed (c/o Marc Briggs at Serra Media)
• New OAuth API Functions:
  • User ID: Retrieve the YouSaidIt User ID with:
    http://yourdomain.yousaidit.com/oauth/user.json?id=YOURID
    http://yourdomain.yousaidit.com/oauth/user.xml?id=YOURID
  • Logout: Clear a YouSaidIt session with:
    http://yourdomain.yousaidit.com/oauth/logout?return_url=http://yourdomain.com/your/usual/logout/url

McGinn enjoys Electionland

McGinn was having a great time answering questions at The Stranger. The campaign staff tweeted a picture of him at the time saying he was having fun. Both he and Mallahan spent an hour answering questions directly posed by and ranked by The Stranger community.

You can check out their answers or ask questions in the upcoming races…

This is an important vote, so get involved and know who you want to get elected and why. If you’re mot aware of the issues – I wasn’t – just go read some of the questions.

Electionland at The Boise Weekly

Check out Electionland at the Boise Weekly.

 

Release 10-15-2009

NEW ADMINISTRATOR FEATURES

• New Cookie-based identity integration. Allows single sign-on integration with Foundation CMS systems and other web services.
• Keyword search on Users and Posts lists.
• More information displayed on users list and user page.
• Easy switching between sites when administrating multiple Q&A’s.

OTHER

• Corporate YouSaidIt website redesign. Check it out at http://yousaidit.com
• Add category description to category nav hover text and main category pages.
• Answer link under answered questions now display first 3 answerers.

The Town Hall you can watch while drinking a beer.

Dominic Holden wrote a great decription of Electionland at The Stranger. They are covering 9 races/initiatives and have virtually all the candidates participating. You ask the questions, they answer them. No media in the middle. So it’s not just watching, you can participate in a Town Hall while drinking a beer. I personally had a great time at the last one – The Housing Levy. I knew little about it at the start and had some pretty simple questions about raising property taxes. By the end I had a real sense of what the pros and cons are and what the impact will be. Very cool.