Ask Fedora: Do we need to add a "solved" tag to answered questions to increase visibility in search engines
Hi,
I don't think we had a formal discussion about this. We've noticed questions with [solved] in the summary recently.
There are two scenarios when this is being used: - the question was answered properly, and the answer did actually help - the person did something like a reinstall, and the question isn't pertinent any more (the poster doesn't need it anymore, so he just adds [solved] and moves on.)
We can always close questions with the "answer was accepted" solution, but I'm not for using that. More answers can always be given, and answers can always be improved.
Here's the first proposal:
- Add "Please do not add the [Solved] keyword to your question summaries. If you received an answer that solved the issue, please mark the answer as correct and reward the helper with karma." to the user guidelines.
Now, the addition of the term "solved" somewhere in the question does help in a way: it helps improve search results, say google/bing/whatever (This is based on my basic understanding of SEO etc, please correct me if I'm mistaken). So, an additional proposal:
- Mods add a "solved" tag to questions that they feel are properly answered, and the answer was accepted, just to ensure that search engines associate the term with the question.
This will ensure that the second case mentioned earlier doesn't occur and improve search results too.
google search -> "site:ask.fedoraproject.org create desktop shortcuts solved"
Now, I do see that stack exchange doesn't do this sort of thing at all, so proposal 2 might not be required at all.
Also, since we're now using instances for languages, shouldn't we have a set of guildelines for moderators, if we don't already? To ensure that everyone follows the same system etc.? I still need to talk to the Spanish mods about the use of the "user group" functionality. Should I ask them to join the infra ML, or is there a simpler way of speaking to all mods? Considering that we do all our discussion here, maybe they should be required to join the infra list? I think a separate ML for mods would be overkill.
Comments?
Hi
On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 10:17 PM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
- Add "Please do not add the [Solved] keyword to your question
summaries. If you received an answer that solved the issue, please mark the answer as correct and reward the helper with karma." to the user guidelines.
I think this is the right approach
Now, the addition of the term "solved" somewhere in the question does help in a way: it helps improve search results, say google/bing/whatever (This is based on my basic understanding of SEO etc, please correct me if I'm mistaken).
Not sure that is true. If one searches within Ask Fedora, ideally the search order should bring up questions with correct answer marked first, followed by answers order by higher karma score. That way good answers come up first within Ask Fedora. I don't think that changes how search engines orders the results however
Rahul
On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 02:17:00PM +1100, Ankur Sinha wrote:
- Add "Please do not add the [Solved] keyword to your question
summaries. If you received an answer that solved the issue, please mark the answer as correct and reward the helper with karma." to the user guidelines.
Coming from Stack Exchange, this is my knee-jerk reaction as The Right Way.
Stack Exchange has built up a culture of being a question and answer site rather than a help forum. We haven't been so successful in Ask Fedora. As I've said before, I blame the software, not the people (and that includes not blaming the askbot authors -- it's just a really hard act to follow and SE is constantly improving and tweaking to get the experience just right).
So, Ask Fedora has come out to be a sort of hybrid, and seems to tend to work a little more like a traditional help forum than Stack Exchange does. Maybe that's okay, and the answer is to relax a little and embrace it -- which putting [solved] in the titles would certainly be.
If we want to do this, though, I'd *really* suggest making it happen automatically when an answer is accepted, because a policy of manual edits will be inconsistent and ugly. And I *really* think we shouldn't abuse tags in this way.
On 01/23/2014 10:53 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 10:17 PM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
- Add "Please do not add the [Solved] keyword to your question
summaries. If you received an answer that solved the issue, please mark the answer as correct and reward the helper with karma." to the user guidelines.
I think this is the right approach
Now, the addition of the term "solved" somewhere in the question does help in a way: it helps improve search results, say google/bing/whatever (This is based on my basic understanding of SEO etc, please correct me if I'm mistaken).
Not sure that is true. If one searches within Ask Fedora, ideally the search order should bring up questions with correct answer marked first, followed by answers order by higher karma score. That way good answers come up first within Ask Fedora. I don't think that changes how search engines orders the results however
as it is now, as far as "guidelines" go, i wonder, why bother with adding another guideline that is not going to be followed.
as for using "[solved]", why even change from it. it shows exactly what word means.
problem is not with use of "[solved]", problem is getting posters to use it.
some will/may/might/have continued a thread with "[solved]" still in "Subject:" when they are writing about something worked until they rebooted or reopen a file.
it is another version of old adage of,
"rules where made to be broken"
to,
"guidelines are seldom add-heard to"
in other words;
"it is human nature for people to tend to bend rules. it is linux nature for users to ignore them."
just my opinion on observations.
On Fri, 24 Jan 2014 14:17:00 +1100 Ankur Sinha sanjay.ankur@gmail.com wrote:
...snip...
Here's the first proposal:
- Add "Please do not add the [Solved] keyword to your question
summaries. If you received an answer that solved the issue, please mark the answer as correct and reward the helper with karma." to the user guidelines.
+1 I think this is right... we shouldn't put solved in the question.
Now, the addition of the term "solved" somewhere in the question does help in a way: it helps improve search results, say google/bing/whatever (This is based on my basic understanding of SEO etc, please correct me if I'm mistaken). So, an additional proposal:
- Mods add a "solved" tag to questions that they feel are properly
answered, and the answer was accepted, just to ensure that search engines associate the term with the question.
This will ensure that the second case mentioned earlier doesn't occur and improve search results too.
I'm not sure this is worth bothering with.
google search -> "site:ask.fedoraproject.org create desktop shortcuts solved"
People won't know to add 'solved' there, and google should give them the answer thats most linked to (in general).
So, I'd say -1 on adding solved to questions.
Now, I do see that stack exchange doesn't do this sort of thing at all, so proposal 2 might not be required at all.
Also, since we're now using instances for languages, shouldn't we have a set of guildelines for moderators, if we don't already? To ensure that everyone follows the same system etc.? I still need to talk to the Spanish mods about the use of the "user group"
I saw that they are translating: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ask_fedora_guidelines/id https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ask_fedora_guidelines/es
Isn't that page the guidelines?
functionality. Should I ask them to join the infra ML, or is there a simpler way of speaking to all mods? Considering that we do all our discussion here, maybe they should be required to join the infra list? I think a separate ML for mods would be overkill.
Comments?
I'm fine with ask admin things going to this list... if the volume gets high we can form another list or come up with some other solution.
Or we could try and use 'meta' on the site itself, but not sure that gets everyone as invloved as they would need to be.
kevin
On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 11:54:13AM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
google search -> "site:ask.fedoraproject.org create desktop shortcuts solved"
People won't know to add 'solved' there, and google should give them the answer thats most linked to (in general).
I wouldn't say that it's universal, but this is a common convention in web forums, and therefore in searches for solutions.
Or we could try and use 'meta' on the site itself, but not sure that gets everyone as invloved as they would need to be.
This has my vote, if we can set it up as a subsite, but I think using the "meta" tag doesn't work.
Hi
On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:25 AM, Matthew Miller . As
I've said before, I blame the software, not the people (and that includes not blaming the askbot authors -- it's just a really hard act to follow and SE is constantly improving and tweaking to get the experience just right).
There is no particular reason Fedora as a project couldn't do it too. Other web applications hosted by Fedora typically has Red Hat paying developers to work on them - pkgdb, bodhi, tagger etc. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get Red Hat to allocate some engineering time or just engage the upstream developers via a contract which they are open to do. I did try via Spot earlier but that didn't work out.
We do get community volunteers to help out by pushing patches upstream whenever we can but naturally that is a slower process. In the last few days, I have talked to atleast three different people who have signed up to complete a few features we need (marking questions as duplicate, pre-filled templates and disabling flags FYI). If we care about the user experience, we need to invest in it.
Rahul
On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 06:22:14PM -0500, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
I've said before, I blame the software, not the people (and that includes not blaming the askbot authors -- it's just a really hard act to follow and SE is constantly improving and tweaking to get the experience just right).
There is no particular reason Fedora as a project couldn't do it too.
We could certainly put more into it, although if we switched every paid person working on Fedora to working on it and were able to also convince a huge number of community contributors that it is the top priority, we would still be significantly behind the resources that Stack Exchange has in putting things even further forward. I don't think that _necessarily_ means we should give up, but just to keep what we _can_ do in the right scale.
Other web applications hosted by Fedora typically has Red Hat paying developers to work on them - pkgdb, bodhi, tagger etc. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get Red Hat to allocate some engineering time or just engage the upstream developers via a contract which they are open to do. I did try via Spot earlier but that didn't work out.
There are a lot of development projects which would help Fedora. I don't have any insight into Spot's exact decision making-process, but we do need to prioritize, and there are more big-impact todo items than time. Right now, as I've said in other messages, I think HyperKitty and Taskotron are really our top priorities. Adam W. is lobbying for improvements to Bodhi, too. I know one can't necessarily scale up a project by throwing more people at it, but generally a team of software developers can et a lot more done by being focused than by having a dozen projects which all get pushed forward a little bit.
We do get community volunteers to help out by pushing patches upstream whenever we can but naturally that is a slower process. In the last few days, I have talked to atleast three different people who have signed up to complete a few features we need (marking questions as duplicate, pre-filled templates and disabling flags FYI). If we care about the user experience, we need to invest in it.
Agreed. My points are a) it needs a big investment and will likely continue to need it in order to keep up in usability and b) there is an opportunity cost in chosing to put effort in any one thing. I think having community QA is important, but in my personal judgment some of these other things are more pressing.
Hi
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 10:36 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
Agreed. My points are a) it needs a big investment and will likely continue to need it in order to keep up in usability and b) there is an opportunity cost in chosing to put effort in any one thing. I think having community QA is important, but in my personal judgment some of these other things are more pressing.
Perhaps. I don't think Fedora has invested much in terms of growing the user community. Our investments have almost always been contributor focused and as I have highlighted before, without a user community, it is unlikely we will continue to grow as a project. If someone wants to go the StackExchange route, it is feasible to do a cost evaluation of the move vs implementing the features we need in Askbot. We are not competing with StackExchange overall and don't need all of what they provide to satisfy our requirements and I think there are benefits to sticking with Askbot in terms of I18N, customization etc.
Rahul
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 10:57:40AM -0500, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Perhaps. I don't think Fedora has invested much in terms of growing the user community. Our investments have almost always been contributor focused and as I have highlighted before, without a user community, it is unlikely we will continue to grow as a project. If someone wants to go
I agree that it's important, and I think some sort of QA site is a key piece. I just think that HyperKitty is more important right now (and also helps with the user community part). I think we really need to focus on getting that (and, as mentioned, Taskotron) into production, and once that's going we can build up other parts too.
the StackExchange route, it is feasible to do a cost evaluation of the move vs implementing the features we need in Askbot. We are not competing with StackExchange overall and don't need all of what they provide to satisfy our requirements and I think there are benefits to sticking with Askbot in terms of I18N, customization etc.
Well, and software freedom.
We don't need to clone Stack Exchange, but in order to be successful in a similar way, we're _really_ far away. The entire notification system needs to be rebuilt. Same with flagging and moderation in general. This is a lot of work.
Hi
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
We don't need to clone Stack Exchange, but in order to be successful in a similar way, we're _really_ far away. The entire notification system needs to be rebuilt. Same with flagging and moderation in general. This is a lot of work.
I don't know what you have in mind. If you could describe the feature wishlist in a lot more detail, that would help.
Rahul
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 02:18:41PM -0500, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
We don't need to clone Stack Exchange, but in order to be successful in a similar way, we're _really_ far away. The entire notification system needs to be rebuilt. Same with flagging and moderation in general. This is a lot of work.
I don't know what you have in mind. If you could describe the feature wishlist in a lot more detail, that would help.
Sure. A non-comprehensive but I hope helpful list:
I. Notifications:
- Notifications are way too noisy.
This has side-effects besides just losing the useful ones in the mess. I get alerts when someone else edited a question I edited, forever. That makes me very unlikely to want to help the site by editing.
So while that seems minor, it's really one of the big ones.
- Notifications make me go to a special page. They're more like yet another inbox than an actual notification system.
- Multiple notifications sometimes appear for the same thing. I'm not sure why -- for example, I have three notifications that someone commented on a particular answer of mine.
- Notifications don't go away when I've seen them. I have to actively select and dismiss them. If you load the _question_ where the notification came from, that puts it into a "seen" state, but all mixed into the list. There are some options for select all or select seen, but that requires more steps.
- "Seen" reponses still count as inbox items until you dismiss, but "dismiss" means deleted. It would be nice if they were actually dismissed from the inbox but not deleted, at least for the most recent.
II. Flagging/Moderation (both user and admin):
A. Flagging:
- I'm seeing 126 flags in the queue right now. Some of these have been dealt with -- I see deleted spam still waiting for action. It's unclear if this queue is personal to me or is a shared queue of all flags.
- Flag offensive is the only flag. But there are lots of other potential reasons to flag questions:
- off topic - spam (maybe "offensive", but a different catagory) - not constructive but not really "offensive". Rants against other distros, say. - other (specify)
or answers:
- as above plus not really an answer (is new question, or attempt at discussion)
- I don't think comments can be flagged at all. (Or am I just not seeing that because I have admin privs?) But if they could, they need the same options as comments, plus "obsolete". Stack Exchange also has "too chatty" (again, the distinction between a QA site and a discussion forum is re-enforced).
- it's unclear if @username notifications work as at Stack Exchange. There, when you type @, a list of possible names (other people with activity on the post you are commenting on) comes up, which makes it obvious.
B. The Moderation Queue
- "Accept" and "Reject" are incredibly confusing in the moderation queue. If someone flags something offensive, and I click "Accept", I get "Post approved". What did that do? Did I approve the post or the flag? I don't know! Well, I do, but only because I tried it -- it does the exact opposite of what I would expect, and _accepts_ the flag and _deletes_ the flagged post.
- The reject (aka deleted-your-question) reason list is empty, leaving no guidance. I could create new reject reasons, but... what kind of reasons do we _want_?
- On the other side (flag itself rejected), there's no way to explain to people why the moderator disagreed.
- There's no way to page through the list of flagged items _in place_ and deal with them there. You have to go through each one in the inbox. That's okay for a) obvious spam where b) deleting is the correct response but painful in all other cases.
C. Transparancy / History
- Moderators have no way of seeing deleted comments.
- Moderators have no report of the actions of _other_ moderators, which is not good for transparency.
D. Closing and Reopening Questions
- There's no community threshold to vote to close questions -- once you get to a certain reputation, you just can do it!
- Closed questions go right to "closed" rather than having an "on hold" grace period encouraging improvement.
- The "question was answered and accepted" close reason is _very_ web-forum like and not very QA site. We should leave room for better answers!
- The "close as duplicate" reason doesn't actually link the questions. In Stack Exchange, not only do the questions get linked, but as I understand it a redirect is set up so that if you come to that question from Google you get automatically taken to the end of the dupe chain so that you're not left in a maze of closed questions.
E. Review Queues
- Stack Exchange has review queues for first posts, late answers, posts which hit some heuristic for low quality, and questions with close or reopen votes. These queues are shown to all high-rep users, there are badges associated with going through them, and users tackle them constantly. For a lot of things like spam, moderators don't even need to be involved.
There's probably a lot more. These are things that occur to me right now. Unrelated to all of the above, the search is terrible. It's unclear how the results are sorted, and you just get back a list of questions with no context. I was just now answering a question which involved giving a kernel boot parameter, and I thought I should just link to someone else who _must_ have answered that part, but I can't easily find one.
On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 04:12:10PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
- Moderators have no way of seeing deleted comments.
And this is worse than it looks, because users with rep of 200 or above can delete other people's comments, with no obvious history or way to undo it. (I just did this by accident with a test account. Oops.)
Ironically, there is an edit link, but users are told that only moderators can _edit_ other users' comments (seems fair). But why edit when you can just delete?
This one is weird enough to me that I asked upstream at http://askbot.org/en/question/12152/can-deleted-comments-be-recovered/
On Mon, 2014-01-27 at 16:12 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
A. Flagging:
This seems to be just *broken*:
A post where I "rejected the offensive flag" because "it wasn't offensive" still got rejected. The flag still shows up and if I try to remove it, it says "cannot remove offensive flag".
http://askbot.org/en/question/12153/cannot-delete-non-existent-flag/
On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 11:54 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
I saw that they are translating: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ask_fedora_guidelines/id https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ask_fedora_guidelines/es
Isn't that page the guidelines?
There are user specific guidelines. I don't think there's anything there for mods. If you really think about it, mod-specific guidelines aren't needed if we can find a way to ensure that all mods can communicate with each other.
For instance, the default daily vote limit is 30, but when I put up the "Use your votes!" section, a user pointed out that it was 50. I have no idea who made the change, but all mods need to be aware of these things.
A simple guideline on the lines of: "Open posts for all changes that you make to settings or any policy changes that you'd like to discuss" could be one way to go.
One policy that we'll like to implement is "Delete spam posts, don't close them", because closing them still keeps them on the list. Until upstream implements a way that makes posts closed as spam/irrelevant move to the bottom of the list or not show at all, closing such posts doesn't serve any purpose.
http://askbot.org/en/question/12143/can-we-keep-questions-closed-as-duplicat...
A "meta" tag could be used when users want to ask the mods something, as is the case already. An additional "admin" tag could be used when mods need to communicate with each other, like a change someone has made, or a change they'd like to propose. To ensure that "admin" posts don't clutter up the question list that users see, we could have a "moderators" user group and limit "admin" posts to this group? Once done, we can always make the posts visible to users if it'll help them.
A "moderator" user group will also help us keep track of the list of mods.
Comments?
2014-01-30 Ankur Sinha sanjay.ankur@gmail.com
On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 11:54 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
I saw that they are translating: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ask_fedora_guidelines/id https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ask_fedora_guidelines/es
Isn't that page the guidelines?
There are user specific guidelines. I don't think there's anything there for mods. If you really think about it, mod-specific guidelines aren't needed if we can find a way to ensure that all mods can communicate with each other.
For instance, the default daily vote limit is 30, but when I put up the "Use your votes!" section, a user pointed out that it was 50. I have no idea who made the change, but all mods need to be aware of these things.
A simple guideline on the lines of: "Open posts for all changes that you make to settings or any policy changes that you'd like to discuss" could be one way to go.
One policy that we'll like to implement is "Delete spam posts, don't close them", because closing them still keeps them on the list. Until upstream implements a way that makes posts closed as spam/irrelevant move to the bottom of the list or not show at all, closing such posts doesn't serve any purpose.
http://askbot.org/en/question/12143/can-we-keep-questions-closed-as-duplicat...
A "meta" tag could be used when users want to ask the mods something, as is the case already. An additional "admin" tag could be used when mods need to communicate with each other, like a change someone has made, or a change they'd like to propose. To ensure that "admin" posts don't clutter up the question list that users see, we could have a "moderators" user group and limit "admin" posts to this group? Once done, we can always make the posts visible to users if it'll help them.
A "moderator" user group will also help us keep track of the list of mods.
Comments?
Thanks, Warm regards, Ankur (FranciscoD)
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha
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I am from Indonesia, I really have to translate the following guidelines, sorry if it's wrong., please advise for these guidelines, what should we do?
On Thu, 2014-01-30 at 17:12 +0800, ekoikhyar wrote:
I am from Indonesia, I really have to translate the following guidelines, sorry if it's wrong., please advise for these guidelines, what should we do?
Translating the guidelines is Ok. Don't worry about it :)
We're discussing ways of keeping moderators in touch.
On Thu, 30 Jan 2014 14:57:19 +1100 Ankur Sinha sanjay.ankur@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, 2014-01-24 at 11:54 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
I saw that they are translating: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ask_fedora_guidelines/id https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ask_fedora_guidelines/es
Isn't that page the guidelines?
There are user specific guidelines. I don't think there's anything there for mods. If you really think about it, mod-specific guidelines aren't needed if we can find a way to ensure that all mods can communicate with each other.
Well, what about some new moderator thats added? Someone will point them to all the info they need or train them? Or they need to go back and read all the 'admin' tagged posts to figure things out?
IMHO, it seems like a wiki page for moderators could be helpfull as well. If only to bring up new people to speed.
For instance, the default daily vote limit is 30, but when I put up the "Use your votes!" section, a user pointed out that it was 50. I have no idea who made the change, but all mods need to be aware of these things.
Yeah, I would put that under: Don't change anything by yourself... propose the change and notify other moderators?
A simple guideline on the lines of: "Open posts for all changes that you make to settings or any policy changes that you'd like to discuss" could be one way to go.
Sure, that could work.
One policy that we'll like to implement is "Delete spam posts, don't close them", because closing them still keeps them on the list. Until upstream implements a way that makes posts closed as spam/irrelevant move to the bottom of the list or not show at all, closing such posts doesn't serve any purpose.
http://askbot.org/en/question/12143/can-we-keep-questions-closed-as-duplicat...
Fair.
A "meta" tag could be used when users want to ask the mods something, as is the case already. An additional "admin" tag could be used when mods need to communicate with each other, like a change someone has made, or a change they'd like to propose. To ensure that "admin" posts don't clutter up the question list that users see, we could have a "moderators" user group and limit "admin" posts to this group? Once done, we can always make the posts visible to users if it'll help them.
Sure. If that all works. Please test in stg first. ;)
A "moderator" user group will also help us keep track of the list of mods.
Comments?
Can that group auto populate from people who have those permissions?
kevin
On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 02:57:19PM +1100, Ankur Sinha wrote:
For instance, the default daily vote limit is 30, but when I put up the "Use your votes!" section, a user pointed out that it was 50. I have no idea who made the change, but all mods need to be aware of these things.
I did an number of these a year or so ago. This specific one was
https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/3509
but see also
https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/3501 https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/3508 https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/3507 https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/3500
A "meta" tag could be used when users want to ask the mods something, as is the case already. An additional "admin" tag could be used when mods need to communicate with each other, like a change someone has made, or
I think we *really* need a separate meta sub-site. This keeps interests separate in a way that tagging doesn't, but is more visible to the community than yet another mailing list.
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