Two new tags: Updated and ReAsk

June 19, 2012 8:06 AM

Let's create two new special tags for AskMe: Updated and ReAsk

The "Updated" tag would indicate that the OP has posted a follow-up comment letting us know that there's news about their situation. Maybe they've followed some of the advice or tried something else.

The "ReAsk" tag would indicate that the OP is still looking for an answer to their question. Maybe there have been some replies so the question doesn't appear in the "Unanswered" section, but none of the replies have done the trick. The ReAsk tag could also indicate that the OP has posted a clarifying comment and is now looking for another round of answers.

Each of these tags would satisfy a common need on AskMe.

People often say "Get back to us and let us know how it worked out." Even when people don't say that, they often think it (at least I do), and maybe they favorite the question so that they can keep tabs on it in case the OP checks back in again.

The point, though, is that updates from OPs are generally interesting. If people started using the Updated tag, I would regularly read ask.metafilter/tags/updated just to get some good stories, and I'm sure other people would as well. That page would help close the paying-it-forward loop and build community.

The ReAsk tag would give people a second shot at asking their questions without cluttering up the AskMe home page with a slightly rephrased version of the question. They'd get a new set of eyeballs on the question. If people started using this tag I would regularly scan ask.metafilter/tags/reask to see if I could help out with any tricky questions that haven't yet been satisfactorily answered.

I'm putting this in the Feature Request category, but it doesn't necessarily require any actual new features in the AskMe user interface. We could adopt these tags by convention (as we initially did with the special Resolved tag), and people could add them and read the tagged posts without any new MetaFilter UI. On the other hand, the tags would get a lot more use if there was some indication in the UI that they could be added and browsed.

posted by alms to Feature Requests at 8:06 AM (11 comments total)

The current state of things is that we have stuff like this in place at least partly.

"ReAsk" is essentially the "stumped" tag that we already treat specially; it will act as a one-time bump to put the question at the top of the sidebar on the Unanswered tab on the front page of askme. Only admins can remove the stumped tag from a question, to prevent people endlessly re-bumping their questions. It's not super high-visibility, obviously, but anything that would be is sort of problematic from the word go. For folks trying to actively look for second-chance stuff, that's an easy spot to monitor.

I don't know where exactly the "updated" tag would fit in; for actually "I solved / concluded this issue stuff" we encourage folks (via an automated mefimail a month later, even) to add the "resolved" tag to questions, which pops them up to the top of the sidebar on the Answered tab. That tag has the same no-removal lock as stumped, for similar reasons.

For questions where there's an update but it's not a resolution, I feel like Recent Activity mostly handles this; if you contributed to or favorited the question and check in with Recent Activity or the My Favorites tab on RA, respectively, it'll pop up when the asker (or an answerer) adds something to the thread.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:13 AM on June 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

I had no idea about the stumped tag. That's kinda awesome.
posted by RolandOfEld at 8:41 AM on June 19, 2012 [7 favorites]

I've always wondered about why the "resolved" tag shows up at the top of the most popular lists, and the other lists. Would it make more sense to exclude it?
posted by Blake at 8:52 AM on June 19, 2012

Would it make more sense to exclude it?

We have discussed this and we are thinking about excluding it from those lists. Our hesitation is that people like to see resolutions. So having "Resolved" in more places means more chances for people to find those questions.

It might make sense to make "stumped" and "resolved" built-in features like best answers. They grew out of organic tag use, but our automated emails and one-click "resolve" features definitely take "resolved" out of the organic use category now. So it might make sense to have resolved be a status and raise its visibility in other ways. We're ok with the status quo for now, but we're definitely thinking about these issues.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:23 AM on June 19, 2012

Maybe what alms means by the "update" tag is for an "update" to appear next to the "more inside" link on the main page of Ask so people can see that the OP came back into the thread to comment?

At least, that's what I thought when I was reading this, but I could be wrong about alms's intentions.
posted by zizzle at 10:10 AM on June 19, 2012

You know what I'd really like: for people who ask questions to actually come back and allocate a best answer, or a resolved tag, when the answer has clearly been given.

I know it's not mandatory, but it's still desirable.
posted by MuffinMan at 1:08 PM on June 19, 2012

I know it's not mandatory, but it's still desirable.

Yeah we totally agree with you which is why it's part of our little update emails to askers. And yeah I like to see the resolved stuff to and agree with pb that it may really be time to move it from tag to feature somehow.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:59 PM on June 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

I never knew about a "stumped" tag, though I use the "resolved" tag all of the time. Learn something new every day.
posted by patheral at 4:10 PM on June 19, 2012

Zizzle, that's not what I had in mind. I was thinking that I could just look at /tags/updated and it would show me the posts with that tag in descending chronological order based on the time of the last comment in the thread. Hmmm, maybe basing the sort on the time of the last comment rather than the time of the post would require some engineering. Anyway, that's the user experience I had in mind.

I had completely forgotten about the stumped tag. It looks like it has only been used 8 times this year, so it might as well not exist. Well, maybe it'll get more activity due to this shootout in the gray.

As for Resolved, I'd vote for increasing its visibility by making it a real part of the UI.
posted by alms at 4:37 PM on June 19, 2012

Let's not and say we did.
posted by jonmc at 4:58 PM on June 19, 2012

jonmc, we've asked you not to do this and we'd like to not get to the point where we're telling you not to do this.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:47 PM on June 19, 2012 [1 favorite]