Chutes and Ladders

Some of our most eagle-eyed members noticed a bit of motion on the points leaderboard the other day. Some users moved up a bunch of places and some moved down.

So, what's going on? We've been working on making the playing field fairer. Specifically, we removed points from users who were abusing the system, and we restored points to users who were being abused. For anyone who cares, we are doing our best to make the points as fair as possible. But no matter how many safeguards we put in place, there is always room for people to work counter to the spirit of wis.dm.

So, it is really up to all of you to help. If you see someone abusing the system, let them know that it isn't okay. And by all means, continue using using the flagging to highlight questions that are inappropriate, spam, etc. Just be fair. And if you need us, you can always reach the wis.dm team at feedback@wis.dm.

Have you asked a wis.dm question on Facebook yet?

Today, we just released a major update to the wis.dm app on Facebook. The biggest change is that you can now ask your friends questions - all from within Facebook. And your matches - who has answered most like you - is now limited to your Facebook friends.

It is now really fun to ask and answer wis.dm questions from Facebook. All in all, the experience now is much better. Give it a try!

What's the right number of topics?

wis.dmers seem to fall into one of a three camps when it comes to question topics. The first group is busy asking questions with no topics at all. That's okay, but not ideal. Why? Well, topics are a great way to make sure that other people with similar interests will see your question. No topics, and your question will have a lower chance of getting noticed. The second group on wis.dm is doing a great job of adding topics to questions. Not much to say here except keep up the good work of adding relevant, concise topics to your questions. The third group of wisdmers has been a bit verbose on the topic choices. No, 50 topics is not helpful. Too many topics on a question is worse than no topics. And topics that have nothing to do with the question waste everyone's time. Some people might even call it spam.

Today, we've limited the number of topics you can add to a question to 10. This is designed to prevent people from adding large numbers of irrelevant topics. We will be rolling out other changes in the upcoming weeks to make topics even more useful. In the meantime, don't forget to flag off-topic questions you come across. Flagging is your chance to influence the ways you want to see wis.dm used.

wis.dm brings questions and answers to Facebook

Yes, it's true, some of the best parts of wis.dm are now available in Facebook. Today, we launched the new wis.dm app for Facebook. It combines what's great about wis.dm - excellent questions and answers, with the reason Facebook is so useful - connecting with all your friends. Bringing the two together lets you do amazing things like see who on Facebook you are most compatible with - all based on who is answering like you. If you are an avid wis.dm question asker, now your Facebook friends can answer your wis.dm questions without leaving Facebook - the questions are right on your Facebook profile.

This is our first pass at integrating wis.dm with Facebook. Tell us what you think, what you'd like to see next and if you are running into any problems. We see tremendous potential in combining Facebook and wis.dm. We hope you do too!

Get the wis.dm app for Facebook here: http://apps.facebook.com/_wisdm_/

Flag It

Thanks to a great effort by the wis.dm team, we managed to accelerate a few of our community moderation tools and launch them earlier this evening. This initiative was brought forward by a couple of weeks in response to some great feedback from the wis.dm community. So, from this evening, you can flag any question as “Wise”, “Unwise”, “Inappropriate”, “Spam”, or “Not yes/no”. Flagging a question as “Wise” promotes the question to the popular pages and as a result gets the question more exposure. Flagging something as “Unwise” has the opposite effect. The object is simply to get some of the amazing questions you are asking to rise to the surface. As far as the other flags are concerned, they’re kind of self-explanatory.

Lots more to come.....

Quality / Points

The vision for wis.dm has always revolved around enabling a "quality" experience - an experience that users can generally benefit from in one way or another. Wis.dm is about raising a debate, inspiring a discussion and utilizing the "crowd" to get answers on subjects that matter. As the site grows - we will continue to innovate and evolve - building tools to enable wis.dm members to benefit in multiple ways from the collective wisdom of a smart, thoughtful group of people.

There has been much discussion about the points system in recent days and about the impact of points on the quality of content. The premise behind points is quite simple: to enable "quality" to bubble up to the surface. It's early days for us and as wis.dm grows in popularity and we attract more and more users we will be constantly learning and making adjustments to all elements of our functionality - there is no doubt that this will apply to the points system. Points must reinforce our mission to "quality" - so watch out for some changes in coming days!