Improving Yedda

Do you something along the lines of "add this to my list of questions, answers or people to track"?

Re the thumb UP/DOWN : I think that YEDDA should monitor the thumb up/down and "see" if they are "real" I.E. grades the answers or are given to change the statistics.

Another idea is to add a reason to why grade an answer with a thumb down. Is the answer wrong , the link not valid or the question was not understood?

I wrote also a detailed private letter to Yaniv about the subject but everyone can check my idea looking , for example on questions I answered yesterday 8.11 and try to decide if every one of them was so bad to get 4 thumb down...

I wrote that it would be interesting to find IF the same participants gave the thumb up/down or not.

I've seen this issue on other sites: Yedda needs forums.  On other sites, the "service space" (whether that is the question-answer system, or opinion system, or something else) gets polluted with material that really belongs in a forum.  

Yoav, thanks for the ideas, I think that giving a reason for thumb down makes a lot sense and would be an important source of feedback for answerers. We'll do that. 

Pistos, welcome, and thanks for the feedback and the ideas!

Re forums: I understand what you're saying. Some things to note though:

One of the nice things about Yedda is that Q&As on a specific topic (say, like Yedda itself) do not "pollute" - you will be exposed to them only if you specify "Yedda" as one of your interests, or if you search for them.

This is happening because Yedda actively matches questions to people, based on your personal interest and preferences.

Having said that, this works well for Q&As - but is still lacking when it comes to brainstorming, commenting, etc - anything that does not fall into the definition of Q&A. So we may need forums after all :) 

Re "as-you-type" - coming soon!

Re preview - we added preview when you compose a question, but not when you answer one. You're right of course and it'd be useful there too, we'll add it. However, note that the editor we use is WYSIWYG, with an integrated spell checker, so you don't actually need to preview to spellcheck / see what it'd look like (won't it be hilarious if, having said this, my post will turn out to have 3 spelling mistakes in it? :)

So thanks again, and I hope you'll continue to enjoy Yedda.  

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Pistos,

Re preview, I agree. It is of value even with WYSIWYG editor. We have it in the Ask page, we'll add it in here as well. 

Re the 8-cm-high box, there is a tiny drag handle on the bottom right-hand of the text box, if you drag it down it will grow the text area. Yes, I know, no one ever noticed it . We'll introduce a more visible way to make the edit boxes larger. 

Re plain text, in fact, the old timers here may remember that we used plain text boxes for a while (in fact, the "Some HTML is OK" link on the top right of the edit box is a bogus left over from those days). The code is still there, and it's being used with some of the older browsers, if we can't get the editor to work reliably for Opera (or for some versions of Opera) we'll add Opera to the list of browsers which use the text editor. 

As for users who "don't fit the stand mould", have no fear, we have enough of those on our team .

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----