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.  

Forums build communities, and (this is very important) provide a mechanism for feedback and dialogue between the users and the developers.  Without forums, as I said, Yedda users will feel forced to pervert the question-space into becoming the tool to meet their needs (the need for social interaction with fellow Yeddites; the need to give feedback and be acknowledged).

Yedda developers might also consider making using of AJAX to support as-you-type suggestion.  I've seen on another site that, when typing in a subject or question, similar or related questions appear in a dropdown, so that you can simply select one of those instead, if it is appropriate.  That cuts down on unnecessary duplication, even for users too lazy to search before posting.

I also notice as I'm writing this that there is no Preview button.  :)  Some of us like to look over their work to check for spelling and grammar errors, or poor wording, or needed rephrasals, etc.

Anyway, that's all for now.  I'm a newcomer here, and the site is looking promising, but I've seen other endeavours fall by the wayside for lack of attention to some very basic issues.

Yedda will have to positively distinguish itself adequately from other question/expert sites.

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.  

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Thanks for pointing out that "feature" of Yedda, re: showing only material of interest; pollution.

Re: Preview: even if the Preview is technically superfluous, there will always be people that want the peace of mind of seeing their post not-in-a-text-box, with the header, footer, margins, etc. etc. I'm one of those people. :) If you have limited development time, that is a whole other story, but I do not see how it can be argued that a Preview is functionally unnecessary. For starters, I don't see my whole post at once, I only see it in a little 8-cm-high box. Ergo, it is not a true preview.

Furthermore, I never use spellcheckers; I always manually spell- and grammar-check.

Also, I know that this is just a personal thing, but I rather dislike WYSIWYG editors because (1) they only occasionally work properly in Opera and (2) I've always believed that one's communications should be able to stand alone, without fancy eye candy. I'm one of those people that prefers plaintext e-mail to HTML e-mail.

And so, I still urge the Yadda development team to add both a preview and a non WYSIWYG editor.

(... a few moments later...)

Now, see, I have already encountered a severe incompatibility in the WYS editor. It seems to be maintaining its own clipboard. I cannot paste anything from outside the text box, I can only paste text which was selected in the text box.

I would neither encourage nor expect you to fix your editor to appease the mere 1% or 2% of visitors who are using Opera; it would take much less effort to simply allow users to set a preference to use a plain <textarea>.

Thank you again for your welcome, and I appreciate your hope that I would remain a member of the Yedda community. As I said, it looks like it has promise, but I still maintain that it has to address these basic issues before it can really start to pick up steam. If not, then, although you would start growing a user base comprised of a certain sort of user, you will be slicing out a non-negligible portion of the Internet; namely, users such as myself who don't fit the standard mould of Average Joe Windows User Surfing With IE.

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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 .

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Yaniv: Thank you for your prompt response. It is appreciated. Might I state that Yedda is already distinguishing itself from many other sites simply by virtue of giving swift and friendly acknowledgement to user suggestions and feedback. This is good.

I suggest that you simply make it an option for users in their account settings, instead of force-feeding them either the plain or the WYSIWYG editor. Your code may not always be accurate in detecting the browser, and quite simply, there will always be some users that disagree with whatever your code chooses. For example, some Opera users may actually prefer to use the WYSIWYG editor, even if I don't.

I look forward to Yedda's positive improvement in the coming days and weeks.
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