Some responses to your questions and feedback

We are grateful to everyone who sent well wishes and feedback to WP Questions during our opening day. I was pleased, of course, that so many people seemed to think it was a good idea.

Hafiz Rahman wrote:

I like the well-defined rules on WPQuestions and how simple it is to ask and answer there.

Ian Steward had kind words:

Brilliant idea and brilliant execution.

Andrew Rickmann had kind words:

WP Questions is a great idea. I wasn’t sure at first but seeing a few questions has converted me.

Kulpreet Singh called us inevitable:

#WordPress paid question-answer. Inevitable: http://www.wpquestions.com

Aviva Johnson struck a non-committed note that really made me chuckle:

Curious to see if this takes off: WP Questions http://www.wpquestions.com

Hey, me too, Aviva! I’m really curious to see if this takes off!

Many people tried the site and sent us great feedback. Utkarsh posted an answer and notified us of a problem with the formatting of the HTML in the answers, which we fixed immediately.

Tom de Bruin sent us a detailed bug report, alerting us to the fact that sometimes HTML was visible on screen:

I noticed it happening a few times in various locations, on the top experts “+” bit and under the

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sponsor . When I’ve just looked the following has appeared on the front page:

?ui=2&view=att&th=1257035cb4bc9c21&attid=0.1&disp=attd&realattid=ii_1257035cb4bc9c21&zw

I’ve attached the ‘view source’ of that page. I haven’t been through it but thought it may help you track the error down.

I’ve seen this myself but I can not figure out the problem. It is fleeting, if you hit refresh it goes away – which makes it difficult to figure out what is going on. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks again, Tom. We are grateful to get such a detailed bug report.

There were certain questions that came up repeatedly. We’ve covered most of them on our About page, but I’ll offer a few quick responses here (these specific questions are from qwik3r, they are representative of other questions that we received):

1.) Do you make it mandatory for askers to put money in escrow? Otherwise they can just get the free answer and not pick anyone.

Yes, the askers pay first. The money is is there for the answerers. We worry about people possibly gaming the system, and we’ve taken measures to make that less likely.

2.) Do you have a feed for all questions so we can stay up to date quickly?

Yes, there is an RSS feed that shows all new questions.

3.) Are askers allowed to respond or post follow up questions after an expert has had the chance to possibly clarify their question?

The asker can edit their post to further clarify it, in response to clarifying questions they might get from potential answerers.

4.) Does pointing someone to a plugin count as answering a question?

Pointing to a plugin could be a good answer, if the plugin does everything the asker is looking for. The decision is usually up to the asker to decide.

Justin Tadlock posted an answer, first with a small error, and then again in corrected form. He pointed out the need for some way to edit the answers:

Ahh! Where’s the edit button? I posted the incorrect version. Please use this version instead

Others (Japh, Ron R, etc) made the same point to us. In fact, having some way to edit the answers was probably the single most requested feature that we heard about yesterday. This raises some issues of integrity and fairness, as someone might post a bad answer, and then later someone else posts a good answer, and the first answerer might edit their answer, based on the information offered in the later answer. Rzen was quick to point out the problem:

@justintadlock @darrenhoyt if you allow experts to edit make sure there is some way to display the revisons to prevent cheatery

We rely on the askers to be fair when they hand out the awards, and we have to have some faith that they will use good judgment. From a programming stand point, we can offer askers more information about who offered what information, and when. After some discussion, we decided that when someone posts an answer, the whole answer should be emailed to the asker (since this is not an advertising supported site, we do not face the typical pressure of trying to maximize the number of people going to the site). The emails will give the asker the full history of the answers they receive. We should have this implemented by Friday.

Stuart Duff wrote a thoughtful post about what we are trying to do. He made this interesting point about the pricing:

One of the things I noticed is currently the minimum price you need to set when asking for help is $20 (£12 UK) which seems a little on the high side to me. I know $20 isn’t necessarily a huge sum of money but it may be high enough to deter many from using this service, after all your only asking a question which could be available with a search on Google for free, right?. Alternatively you could ask for free help on any wordpress related support forum and probably receive the correct answer or be pointed in the right direction if you don’t mind waiting a few hours. On the flip side of this you do need to make the service worthwhile for people to participate and answer the questions in the first instance, a kind of catch 22 balancing act I suppose.

LiliekS also raised the issue of price:

20$ for a question and answer. Is it worth it?

We appreciate your feedback. I am sure in the months to come we will spend a lot of time thinking about the price issue.

I’ve been working on websites for 10 years, and I’m very pleased with how our first day went – much better than average. We received a lot of valuable bug reports and thoughtful feedback. I was pleased to see some questions posted. Our fees are 9% plus 50 cents. PayPal takes about 3% and 30 cents, so our net profit from yesterday was less than $10 dollars, but, hey, that means we made more on our first day than Twitter made during its first 2 years. Which leaves me hopeful that we are, in fact, offering a service that provides real utility to people. And as we listen to your feedback and implement the better ideas, we hope to be able to offer an even greater service in the future.