Get to the question.

June 23, 2005 10:30 AM

Get to the question. Since the introduction of the system more inside feature in AskMe the number of posts where the question isn't on the main page has been trending upwards. Yesterday was especially bad. It would seem that actually asking your question where skimmers can see it would be a prudent course of action.
posted by Mitheral to Etiquette/Policy at 10:30 AM (10 comments total)

I agree.
posted by mischief at 10:48 AM on June 23, 2005

Agreed.
posted by Rothko at 10:51 AM on June 23, 2005

This is mostly my fault actually. Lots of these examples put the question in the page title tag, instead of the intro front page area.

I'll move the page title entry to the bottom of the question-posting form.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:53 AM on June 23, 2005

I just finally made the change to the posting forms.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:57 AM on June 23, 2005

Yah!
posted by timeistight at 11:12 AM on June 23, 2005

Wow, instant gratification of a pony request I didn't even know I was making! Thanks Matt.
posted by Mitheral at 11:17 AM on June 23, 2005

A minor suggestion - swap the boxes? The Question box is about 3 times the size of the [MI] box -- that invites essays --> real estate hogging. Otherwise good post Mitheral and thanks Mathowie.
posted by peacay at 12:42 PM on June 23, 2005

I made my first Ask.Me post today and I would have to say it falls under these lines. I was initially a little intimidated by the input fields, as I didn't want to inadvertently post a huge stream of text where my question was supposed to be. I wanted to keep it short, and my question required some background information to pare it down from the get-go. I'll keep this thread in mind if I ever need to use the service again and try to orient the post accordingly.
posted by prostyle at 2:31 PM on June 23, 2005

Dude, mine was a posting accident, and I specifically spent the next two comments noting that, then asking that the post be deleted.

WTF is your problem?
posted by dreamsign at 10:29 PM on June 23, 2005

dreamsign this wasn't a call out[1]. I didn't even read your post. And I didn't know these were being generated by a poor user interface. I just grabbed all the AskMe posts that were on the front page that didn't seem to have an actual question on the front page.

Matt's change seems to have done the trick. I don't see a single post on the front page without a question.

[1] This is a call out. Note the use of usernames indicating attempted user correction rather than a systematic concern as in this post.
posted by Mitheral at 12:04 PM on June 24, 2005