no.stupid.answers

Thanks to your great feature requests, we are proud to present a few new ones this week.

Powerful action filters

Recent site activity, recent category activity, user contributions, question history… these lists have been a part of WikiAnswers since the dawn of time (on our timeline, anyway). They contain everything from adding an alternate to changing capitalization; editing an answer to writing on a message board. But they are underused because they can be overwhelming and hard to keep up with.

Enter action filters, and these same pages become extremely powerful, time-saving tools. Now that you can filter lists for your favorite action, you can dive into all kinds of projects. For example:

• Catch potential vandals in the act. Filter for new answers written by guests.
• Get people quick answers. Answer new questions asked by members and their email updates will tell them their answer is waiting.
• Clean up categorization. Filter for categorization by guests.
• Stay on top of your category. Filter for new answers in a category.
• Maybe it still needs improvement? Check out what just got unflagged.
• Focus on a particular contributor. Explore all their questions asked or answers edited.
• Cut out the noise in question history. Just focus on the edits.

Those were some pre-set filters, but if you want to dive in deeper, you can use filters in any combination you like. Here’s how:

1. Go to a page with filters (recent site activity, recent category activity, user contributions, question history).
2. Select a filter option from each drop-down menu. Some pages will have an action menu and a user-type menu; others only have an action menu.
3. Click GO and feel the magic!

More snippets…

You may already be familiar with answer snippets on the search results page, recent site activity pages and category pages. Now we’ve added them to the recently answered questions page, making it that much easier to comb through new answers for bad apples.

Here’s what they look like:

Enhanced spellchekc spell check

Splelling is sometimes a probelm on WikiAnsers, and we like to encourage contributors to take advantage of their various options: IE spell check, Firefox spell check, WYSIWYG spell check…

But in case these aren’t enough, we’ve added one extra push for spell check – a little gradeschool reminder to Spell check your answer! (In case you tried to click on that, well, it’s not a link.)

Next time you edit an answer, just click on the Spell check your answer link near the Save button. It’s fun, it’s fast and it helps!

Send us your feedback!

We hope you enjoy these new goodies – post your thoughts, comments and other feedback below. And once you’ve had a chance to get creative with filters and snippets, send me your most creative ways of using them (pickleshy @ wikianswers.com). The most helpful and creative will be published here for the greater good (or the greater laugh!)

Updates: Corrected the email address – apologies to all those who emailed me at the wrong address!

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!

I know that yesterday I brought up a brand new feature on WikiAnswers – the Community Forum – but it seems there’s another new feature live, which, in my opinion, is just as cool.

Now when you do a search on WikiAnswers, your results come up with… snippets! Snippets are the first bits of text that are part of the greater answer. When you can see the snippet, you can get a quicker feel for whether an answer is correct, inappropriate, etc.

As one colleague said, this is going to further bring out the WikiAnswers-brand OCD in all of us.

Try to do a search now – type any topic into the advanced search bar and enjoy!