I think we have a lot of members who are excellent here but the Q&A area isn't as easy to use as it could be, which may deter leveraging members knowledge to help other members. With a little TLC, this could be a very active and valuable part of TR's site.
1. Today?s questions, this week?s question: I would like to choose the categories I usually participate in and see all new questions for the day or for the week. This will make it MUCH faster for me to see which questions are new that I may be able to help in. Like many IT folk I like to help, but don?t have a lot of time to wander around the various topics looking to see if there are new questions. Make it faster for me to find these questions and I?ll have more time to answer them!
2. My questions open, my questions closed: As I participate in more questions the page where they are summarized becomes difficult to navigate. Really I only care about questions that are still open that I am participating in day to day. It would also be nice to see which answers have been rated and ones that haven't gotten a response yet.
3. Stale questions: I have participated in a lot of questions where the person disappears never to be heard from again leaving us all hanging. Likely they have their answer or figured it out but don't bother to go in and clean it up.
This is a difficult topic because without a lot of moderators and work to keep it fair how do you control abuse?
One idea I have is the "flag" system. Much of this can be automated! Beside a posters name in the general view (before going into the question) you can see one or more flags to the right of their name. You can also see this
White flag - user is new to the forums, and hasn't posted or closed any/many questions.
Green flag - user is active in the forums, and closes their questions and awards points, and responds to answers within a reasonable time (3 days maybe).
Yellow flag - user has some ?neglected? questions where they have not responded to answers between 3 days and a month.
Red flag ? User has a history of ?jilting? questions (closing without awarding points) or has questions that are outstanding over a month without responding to answers.
(here is my "infamous" jilted link on the worst one I experienced: https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-11190-0.html?forumID=40&threadID=157386&start=0&tag=search )
This way going through the questions, green flag members can be rewarded by other members for their promptness and courtesy by getting good ?service? on their questions. And yellow and red flag users will know if they don?t clean up their act they may not get a lot of help from other members.
4. Points: You recommend up to 150+ points for a "hard" question, this seems pretty low. You would think that it would be at LEAST 50/50 especially when these points can get split 2 ? 3 ways in a typical question. Wouldn?t if make sense to reward those who are helping you by giving 500 for a basic question, 750 for intermediate and 1,000+ for hard? The current "example" seems to discourages people who take the time to help from being rewarded appropriately, and people will normally flock to the higher point questions.
