As far as WordPress sites goes, WP Questions remains a small site. Some WordPress sites have 10s of thousands of members. All the same, WP Questions has a vitality that earns it a good reputation, and people continue to join. I’m pleased to say we now have 5,000 members:
It is surprising that so much money has gone through the site despite the fact that it has so few members. I am excited to think how many prizes will be paid out to experts by the time the site has 10,000 members.
We are changing the way we give money to developers.
Since this site began, we have had a donations program through which we gave money to various themes and plugin developers:
This program never amounted to huge money, but we did have 4 projects that eventually got over $100.
But all of this is about to change.
Starting in September, all donations will have to be voted on by the community. The process will go like this:
1.) if you are a developer or a theme or plugin, you can fill out the form requesting money from the community.
2.) the community then has 30 days to vote. The eligible voters consist of the top monthly experts and the top all time experts.
3.) your proposal must get a quorum, which we define as 5 voters, and it must win a majority of those who vote.
4.) if your proposal wins the vote, it then goes into the pool of active donation projects. Your project stays in the pool of active donation projects for 6 months. Then you must reapply.
5.) the community will then vote to donate a percentage of the Community Pot to each project. Currently there is about $400 a month going through the Community Pot.
An example:
You are developing the greatest plugin ever for managing images via WordPress. You apply for donations. 6 of the experts on the site vote, so you get a quorum. 4 experts vote in your favor, and 2 of them vote against you, so you win the vote. Your plugin is now in the active pool of donation projects, and it will remain so for 6 months. Let us suppose, hypothetically, there are 4 other active donation projects. The experts have voted roughly 5% to most of the other projects, but they like your project very much, so they vote you 10%. The experts have now voted to donate a total of 30% of the Community Pot to the 5 projects, and they are keeping 70% for themselves. You get 10% each night, whenever there is a payout from the Community Pot.
The experts might approve your project, but then vote you 0%, so in a sense, you have to win 2 votes, the one to get in, and then the one to get a decent percentage. It’s up to you to explain to the community why your project is so important that it deserves a donation.
We have no idea if the experts will actually vote you a penny. They might want to keep all the money to themselves, and we respect their right to do so.
This new system should be in place by mid September.
We’ve been experimenting with the listing fees that we charge on WP Questions. PayPal charges us .30 cents plus 5% on every transaction. When the site started, we charged .60 cents and 6%, but we soon realized we could not make any money at that level. We raised our prices to $1 plus 12% and was at that level for most of a year. Then, for 2 weeks, we charged 20% (and zero cents). Now we are experimenting with charging a flat fee of $2.49.
Each of these prices has a different kind of impact. A flat fee probably encourages bigger prizes since, as a percentage, the cost goes down on the larger prizes. A flat fee may kill off the $4 questions, which may or may not be bad for the site. Conversely, a purely percentage fee punishes those who want to offer a large prize.
Regarding the 20%, the owner of Tourkick sent us an email, which we quote with permission:
I didn’t know what the fees were before but they were small, probably enough to cover PayPal’s fees. You guys should net more than zero of course – we don’t want the website and its code snippets and conversations to go away – but, like I expressed, 20% gets expensive when paying $10 – $30 or more. It discourages shelling out that extra dollar or 2 or 5, since WPQs support is already cheap help.
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It could be tempting to add money to Kailey Lampert’s Starbucks card instead of increasing the amount in WPQs… but I didn’t do that.
….
…If I were you, I’d like some percentage. I like the idea of base fee plus %. I think the reason we couldn’t figure the charges is because they weren’t published. I like the up front visible “20%” right below the button.
In order for a flat fee to be worth your while, it’d have to be more than $3, but any higher than that would be cost prohibitive for lots of little questions, which is the site’s purpose/value.
Personally, I try to earn enough to afford asking my own next question. I’m not sure how many others are like that, but if I could use my WPQs balance toward asking q’s, that would save you and me processing fees. Plus, it might encourage people to keep their balance in your PayPal account.
To that last point, yes, at some point soon we hope to allow people to ask questions for “free” using their WP Questions balance. By “free” I mean no listing fees.
What we are trying to do is tricky. We are trying to create a convenient place where askers and experts can meet. If we charge too much, then of course it makes more sense for the askers and experts to cut out the middleman (us) and deal directly with each other. Yet all the same, we need to find a way to make enough from this site that its economically rational for us to continue with it.
To that end, we will continue to experiment with prices.
Misty, our Technical Director, pulled together several price schemes into an Excel spreadsheet which shows different prizes with different flat fees and percentages, and what our profits would be for each: Fee Profit Comparison
We remain open to suggestions about what the makes the most sense for both askers and experts.
I’d like to say thank you to Andrzej Zglobica, who donated $12 to Javascript Questions. This was a pure donation to the community, which does a great deal to help the community. His $12 goes into the Community Pot and will be paid out to everyone on the site who has helped answer questions.
I logged into PayPal this morning and was happy to see his name there:
(On a sidenote, I am surprised how often people log into
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to withdraw $1.)
An alliance exists between Codewi.se and the top experts on Codewi.se sites (such as WP Questions). We have mutual interests. So I’m wondering what more we can do promote our top experts (of all-time, and also the top monthly experts)?
One thing we will soon start doing is listing all of the top experts here on Codewi.se, to give them some extra exposure.
Another thing
we will do is a weekly tweet of the top weekly experts, a simple tweet that congratulates them for their good work.
But what else can we do? I’m open to suggestions.
I learn a lot about WP Questions by reading what others are saying about the site. This week I’ve started working with a new designer, who will be helping to clean up some of the rough edges. To help bring her up to speed, I gathered together many of the articles that have been written that reference us, and I also thought I might post them here.
WordPress for Blogs, CMSs, and So Much More. This article says nice things about us, but it seems to be under the misimpression that the site was built with WordPress.
What never fails in the WordPress community is someone saying, “I think I can do X with WordPress,” where X is a completely untraditional approach to what is said to be just blogging software. Two excellent examples of such alternative sites just happen to be WordPress community resource sites. The first, Theme Finder, is an aesthetic wonder for visually browsing for WordPress themes by screenshots filtered by
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Also, this is interesting: For those who just need a little coding help, but do not want to go all out and pay
a lot of money to a freelancing site, this works great.
I actually asked a question recently and within minutes I had a response. I even had been personally helped by Oleg Butuzov (@butuzov) to work out a code I have been wanting to work with involving adding Adsense. All of the available tutorials had not been working correctly, so I turned to WPQuestions. Thanks Oleg for your help!
Mostly me: WPMU.org Interviews Lawrence Krubner – Founder of WP Questions. This is just me talking about the site. The questions were good.
Stuart Duff wrote about us when we first launched, and we initially set a $20 minimum on all questions:
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.
Steve Lambert started recommending us as tech support for some of the code he’d written. I’d like to enter into more formal relationships with any developer who wants to recommend us as their tech support forum.
One of my all-time favorite articles about us was written very early in the history of the site: A humbling experience.
Compared to those two codes, mine was much longer: it involves regular expressions, string replacement, and so on. While it did work, I concluded that I was just thinking too far. The first solution didn’t worry about editing core files, while it’s something completely out-of-question for me. The second solution simply do away with creating its own list, while I insisted on making use of wp_list_bookmarks‘ output, forcing me to go the regex route.
Aside from that, I also struggled with a couple of curious cases: first was that wp_list_bookmarks will sometimes wrap an anchor text in an tag for God knows what reason. Quite a lot of time was spent looking around for why it happened, while it’s not directly related to the problem. The second was the revelation that WordPress does not record the time when a Link is inserted, only if it’s updated. There’s actually a plugin that fixed that problem.
To put it short: I had too many rules in mind while looking for a solution.
I don’t think that is the wrong way per se, but I learned that sometimes, especially if it’s a time-critical problem, finding a faster solution can be more desirable.
So thanks WPQuestions. I’ve always thought that the site could be a good place for learning and dealing with actual WordPress use cases, and today’s experience proved that once more. If you do WordPress development, I’d really recommend going through the archives and see the various awesome ways people came up for a curious problem.
I also like Fiverr vs. WPQuestion
I recently decided to try out Fiverr, a site where you can put up a service and charge $5. Basically it’s a niche $5 trade off site where someone can do a small skillful task and someone else is willing to lay down $5 for it; server provider takes $4 and fiverr take a $1 cut. Psychologically speaking and marketing wise; $5 is pretty much the holy grail of prices among products in that price range.
While it works great for a lot of things, it was an Epic fail for WordPress support questions. I specifically worded my gig to not accept advanced questions or questions that would require me to fix a plugin or do something that took more than an hour. Frankly, I was not even up for dealing for a 30 minute problem because… well $5 is not even worth it and I would prefer to give it out for free or not at all.
Also, Great Ways to Get Your Questions Answered Online:
When you’re trying to tweak your site, and manage to entirely break your code, it’s easy to get desperate as you’re trying to find the answer you need. WP Questions is an interesting twist on the standard Q&A site. You can post your emergency questions about WordPress, include the code you’re having trouble with, then include a cash payment for the expert who answers your question. You can then vote up the answers that are most helpful, or browse answers that others received. It’s an interesting twist, and might be a great way to motivate the most experienced people to help others without wasting their time.
I know that
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Javascript Questions does not get much traffic, so I want to point out to everyone that I posted a question there.
I appreciate the way that Alessendro explains why they vote the way they vote. We would never make this mandatory, but I do think it helps the community, when these things are explained.
About WordPress NextGen (Search engine Plugin) Image Links don´t open Alessendro wrote:
Asker did not award the expert after his reply to him, saying that his answer works. Obviously asker does not know the system well.
About Need Suggestion Alessendro wrote:
Asker looking for suggestions. It is only fair for him to award price money after suggestions are made irregardless whether they are useful to him.
About Custom fields clear entries after 2nd time editing:
Denzel provided the correct answer on his second amendment. The correct WordPress “way” is to use update_post_meta, as it will replace old value with new. There is no need to return post id after making post meta update, as it is redundant.
About Excerpt Issue – linkage:
Denzel deserve some price money for pointing them towards the correct direction, which is highlighting that the changes should be made within the page template and not filtering in functions.php
Our first site, WP Questions, gets a nice mention in this article (which offers an overview of several question and answer websites):
Great Ways to Get Your Questions Answered Online
We (me and my business partners) are working very hard to get our software out so anyone can create any Q&A site of their own.
I’m torn between feeling overwhelmed by the competition and being pleased to be included with such major sites.
We tried last year but didn’t make the cut. We’ve made some progress over the year, so we are going to try again. Better product, better software, more clarity about the basic idea: maybe we will get in.
