no.stupid.answers

You may have noticed some extra activity in the WikiAnswers search box… or tiny badges on your bio page. Not to mention little snippets of text here and there.

No, aliens have not taken over WikiAnswers (this time). We’ve rolled out a couple of great new features that we hope will make asking, answering and searching a more pleasant and effective experience for you. Our goal with these features is to bring information more directly to you so you don’t have to search for it – and we hope you’ll let us know if we’ve achieved that goal. Now, without further ado, an overview of said features:

FAYT (Find As You Type)

Asking a question? Looking up a person, place or thing? No problem – before you’ve even finished typing, we’ll show you if there’s a matching reference article – or if someone in the community has answered your question.

Just click the “All” radio button and start typing. Reference articles are prefaced by a book icon (), and community Q&A are prefaced by a bubble icon (). Or, choose just “Community Q&A” or “Reference Topics” to limit your search to one type of information. Our suggestions will appear in a list – click an item on the list, or hide the list if you’d rather not see it. (But we think it’s pretty helpful.)

Try looking up “Why is the sky blue?” The find-as-you-type results look like this:

Snippets

Snippets are a short previews of current answers. By looking at snippets, you can get a sense of the answer before you click through to see the question page and question history. Snippets showed previously on the search results page, and now we’ve added them to the recent site activity pages and the category pages. If you’re watching for vandalism, you can now comb the snippets for spam and other bad answers without opening each question.

This is what snippets look like on the recent site activity page:

And on the category page:

Snippets are also a convenient way to determine on the spot if a question is answered or unanswered. No snippet? It’s unanswered.

Stats box redesign

Do you like peeking at other contributors’ contribution stats (or your own)? We’ve tweaked the design to make it even easier to see who they are and what they’ve done.

Visit anyone’s bio page and hover over a mini-badge to see the full badge in all its glory. Also, if you’re a Supervisor, look for a brand-new toolbox at the bottom of the stats box.

Batch revert… turbo style

And, finally, a power tool for Supervisors: turbo Batch Revert, so you can undo weeks of vandalism in just one click. We have lifted the one-week limit on reverts, so go do your thing and catch those vandals!

Survey says?

Check out these tools and tell us what you think. They’ve been a long time coming, and we hope you enjoy them!

You may have noticed some small changes to the site today – and if you did, well, you’ve got sharp eyes. Much of today’s release was focused on bug fixes and performance improvements, and if your answers load faster than usual, feel free to tip your mental hat to our engineering team.

Meanwhile, we’ve added a few handy tools to the menu on the left-hand side of the page. (To access the full version of the menu pictured here, sign up/log in and it will appear immediately.) The new tools are:

• browse categories (takes you to category HQ, where you can search for a topic or browse our category list)
• random page (jumps you to a randomly-picked question on WikiAnswers)
• WikiAnswers email (direct link to WA inbox – supervisors only)

So, what else is new in this release?

Browse unanswered questions

We’ve made it even easier to answer new questions on your favorite topic by adding a FAYT (find-as-you-type) search box to the unanswered question page. Just start typing and related categories will appear.

Who’s on the Community Forum?

The Community Forum also saw a small but significant change today. Scroll down to the bottom of the forum, and you’ll see a new section called “Viewing this forum.” Listed there are all the other members and community assistants who are currently browsing the forum. If you need help with the site, or just advice from another WikiAnswerer, you can turn to these folks for help.

Category page design tweaks

The category page was treated to a modest makeover to improve readability and flexibility. See if you can spot the differences between the old and the new designs!

That’s a wrap! Until next time… onward and upward!

UPDATE: Thanks to Matthew for pointing out that a fix for the missing bio pages didn’t, in fact, make this release. We apologize, and it’s on the way.

A whole bunch of new features and pretty touches went live on WikiAnswers today, but one that I am particularly fond of is the new layout for the Browse Categories page. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

You may or may not have hung out in that part of wiki-town before, but you should definitely stop by for the tag cloud, the Newest Categories list, the detailed categories tree, but most of all, the Find As You Type-supported Find a Category feature.

That baby comes equipped with all the categories on WikiAnswers. All you need to do is start typing the first letters of the category you seek and it pops right up in a suggested list below the box. Much like the Answers.com version on the homepage and beyond. Works great if you’re not sure what you’re looking for and you want to find obscure categories you’ve never come across before.

Here are some other great features that just went live today:

• You can now view Recent Site Changes based on all users’ contributions, only registered users’ contributions, or only guest users’ contributions.
• Fancy shmancy new message board design. Ooooh yeah.
• There is now an animated New Message icon when you receive – you guessed it – a new message on your message board. As one product manager said, “Its mouth opens and closes. It’s like a man-eating envelope.” Just be careful not to stick your finger inside that little guy…