HP Q&A wish list

1. 0

   robhamptonposted 7 years ago

   The option to post photos. Also something that was brought up in another post.. The ability to clarify or communicate. Example: "I followed your instructions per your article but my pool is still green. What should I do?"
   
   What I'm saying is that this would be an impossible question to answer without knowing so many more details. (Above ground pool?, Inground?, type of filter? Current chem readings?, etc... It's an innocent and genuine question but I surely can not answer it without knowing other things. I do very well with traffic on the qa, but needs some improvement. Thoughts?

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      eugbugposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Being able to add photos is a feature sadly missing from "Comments" also.

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2. 66

   lobobrandonposted 7 years ago

   I've had times where I could use a table and definitely a link tool too.
   
   Follow up questions can be a very useful feature. Could have used it a few times. On this answer for instance.

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      robhamptonposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Your answer is so much longer than mine are! Most of mine are 3 or 4 sentences.

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3. 67

   eugbugposted 7 years ago

   The ability to add symbols when creating equations, plus superscripts and subscripts. Using the Windows Character Map is a workaround, but there's a lot of copying and pasting involved.

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      robhamptonposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      Huh? What does that have to do with retaining or responding to relevant information from a viewer asking questions about an article?

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         eugbugposted 7 years agoin reply to this

         On mathematical articles, questioners often ask how to solve mathematical problems which sometimes requires equations to be used.

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4. 77

   EricDockettposted 7 years ago

   1. Add directions so readers are prompted to ask one succinct question at a time. Consider limiting characters. No more long-winded run-on paragraphs with "What do you think?" tacked on at the end. It's madness.
   
   2. Improve the text editor and upgrade to include cleaner links with nofollow option, images, number and bullet lists, and easy bold/italic/underline.
   
   3. Add a comment/discussion section to the questions. This will add content to the page over time and engage readers.
   
   4. Create a way for readers to peruse all of the question on a given topic, so they aren't asking the same question that has already been answered before.
   
   5. Please, HubPages, for the love of All That Is Holy, give us some guidelines and best practices for answering these questions. Surely there is enough data by now to draw some conclusions. Are long answers better? Short answers? Personal answers? Broad answers that might appear in search? Give us a clue, here!

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      DrMark1961posted 7 years agoin reply to this

      I disagree with your first point. I would rather have a long question that tells me a lot of things I do not need to know. I can always edit out the stuff I do not want. The thing I do not need to see, and the questions that I usually just ignore, are the succint ones like "Why is my dog vomiting?" Well, there is not a lot I can do with that sort of question.
      I think Rob would agree. "Why is my pool still green?" does not give him a lot to go on. He needs to know what kind of pool, what sort of measurements the pool has, what type of filter, etc.
      
      The comment/discuss idea is great. The questions are looked at a lot, and I bet there are a lot of readers that want to mention something about the question or answer.

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      1. 77

         EricDockettposted 7 years agoin reply to this

         My main issue is this: When someone asks a detailed, elaborate, highly personalized question, our answer to that question has an audience of exactly one person in the entire world.
         
         On the other hand, if someone asks, "Why is my pool green?" and Rob can provide an in-depth, comprehensive answer to all the reasons a pool might be green, that answer has the potential to help thousands of people. It also has the potential to rank in search, where a personal question would struggle.
         
         IMO, personalized interactions should happen in the comments, where there can be a back and forth with the reader and it doesn't create a new page on the niche site. I almost always answer them in comments, but I ignore them in qanda because I don't see how any good can come of them.
         
         In fact, I turned off qanda on my biggest account the other day because I had a couple of articles grab an extra 3000 views over 48 hours on flipboard. They were top 10-type opinion articles, and I got a lot of "questions" that simply said "What about (this)?" In the comments I could have had a nice discussion with the person, but there is no sense creating a qanda page for a one-sentence answer. It was a wasted opportunity.
         
         Really, it comes down to the fact that answering a question creates a new page. If questions just appeared on the article I wouldn't care. Hundreds of thin pages on the niche sites are going to be a problem eventually.

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            lobobrandonposted 7 years agoin reply to this

            The thin pages being a problem, there's nothing we can do about it. It's the team that has to handle this.
            
            But, the questions that I get the most views on are the ones I would think are helpful to just that one person who asked the questino, but I was wrong. Many people are curious and probably have the same issue too.
            
            Rob is getting these questions on his hub on green pools, so he already has one of those.

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            DrMark1961posted 7 years agoin reply to this

            My most popular answer has over 10,000 page views. The reader tells me how many hours she works, how old her kids are, what characteristics she needs in her new dog (like no shedding, etc.). It looks like TMI, but people read it and open up the answer since the question is similar to their own situations.
            If she just asked "What kind of dog should I get?" I would have just deleted the question.
            So I think my preference for detailed questions is based on personal experience, but then aren´t most of our preferences because of experience? Not sure that I am right, but if someone asks "Why is my pool green?" I would just tell them to read the hub. (If I even bothered to reply.)
            
            I still see the value in comments, but I wonder if they are often lost and never read. I am pretty sure that the OP will come back and look at the reply, but others? No idea. No way to know this either.
            
            I avoid short answers, but from looking around at other articles I realize that there are a lot out there. As Brandon has pointed out, we might eventually get penalized for those low quality articles. And since Google sees us all as one entity, a penalty is going to hurt all of the writers on this site. I think your 5th point is the most important of all. (If those short answers are not helpful, maybe HP should go in and eliminate them.)

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      lobobrandonposted 7 years agoin reply to this

      I disagree with the first point. I need my questions to be informative. Like DrMark says I can remove any parts I do not want.

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