A New SpanishDict is Coming....We Want Your Feedback!
Hi Everyone!
We have been working hard on a brand new version of SpanishDict! We have gone through the site from top to bottom and where we saw opportunities to make things better, we did our best to do it.
One of the biggest changes you will see on the new site is a totally overhauled forum. This section of the site will be geared toward getting people answers to their questions as quickly and as easily as possible, while making it more engaging for those much-appreciated members of the forum that often take the time to answer people's questions. We are calling the new system 'SpanishDict Answers'.
Here are some of the shiny new features that you will see?
Voting!
You will be able to vote on the quality of people's questions and answers. See a well thought out question or answer? Vote it up. Questions and answers with more votes will get highlighted more often throughout the site.
Reputation!
If you post good questions and answers, and these posts receive up votes from other members, you will earn reputation points. The more reputation points you earn, the more privileges you will receive. Here is basically how it will work:
- Receive a vote up - Earn 10 points
- Receive a vote down - Lose 2 points
As you earn more points, you will earn more moderator-style privileges. This give more control of SpanishDict to the community, which brings up the next big addition:
Community Wiki!
For members of the site that have enough reputation points, they will be able to edit the questions and answers on the site, like a wiki. You will be able to see all the edits that are made to a post, and improve the post over time. We believe this will allow the community to build outstanding responses to questions. We are even making this feature available on Reference articles for members with a high reputation, so that the SpanishDict community can build the best Spanish reference available anywhere.
We have even more in store for you. But I would love to get your thoughts and feedback on the these items. Please post your ideas to this thread. I attached a few screen shots of what we have in development to give you a sneak peak of the new site.
Hasta Luego,
Chris
60 Answers
I DON'T like the idea of the "vote down". I have no problems with highlighting the more informative answers (the vote up), but not penalizing poor answers.
You can not discourage beginners from making crude attempts and still call this a learning site.
Yes, reward the betters answers, but forget about penalizing anyone for making an attempt.
If I understood what has been said before correctly I would like to say the following: We never learn anything by not making mistakes - it is ONLY when we make mistakes and then correct them that we learn something. This applies not only to language learning. Therfore do not penalise mistakes - it just stops people trying.
Another thought beyond the voting issue...
I liked the feature on the old format that showed more information about the forum members - in particular, their native language and self-reported fluency with Spanish. In terms of establishing a level of reputation, I found these to be a very helpful (though not the only) means of determining a person's ability to offer an accurate answer to a question.
Can we get this back?
What I would like to see is a proportionate increase in time to answer in the "Recall" section of the Flashcards in relation to the number of characters in the response. The reason is that I use a pen tablet. It takes me a few seconds to put the pen on it's stand, start typing, and if I have to enter special accent characters, I loose valuable seconds in trying to point to the right character to insert, and, my score begin to plumet. Perhaps I should invest in a touch screen? Aw that's going to cost me plenty! But jokes aside, what chance would a paraplegic have against the clock?
Re: Mark
Very good question Mark. I should have mentioned in the first post that the act of voting itself actually takes reputation. If I were to invite my friends from Facebook to the site, they would all have to create an account. Then they would all have to post a question or answer. Then all these questions and answers would have to get voted up by other members. Finally they would only be able to cast one vote per question/answer. And even if a person went through all this effort, and invited all their friends to go through all this effort, a person never becomes an administrator by reputation. They can work their way up, over time, to get the ability to edit posts'and all edits are easy to undo as every prior version of a post is saved. If people are abusing the site, perhaps through malicious editing, the moderators (Heidi and Eddy) on the site will warn them, and if they continue, they will be banned from the site. I hope this is a reasonable way to prevent people from trying to abuse the site.
Re: Down voting
I think you guys that brought up the downside of the down voting are offering some valuable feedback. We are going to think carefully about how to handle this. We presume good faith among the members and hope that the members presume good faith among each other. A down vote would not be meant to 'penalize? people. A person can never go below 1 reputation point. Rather down votes would likely be cast when members post sloppy questions or didn't put much effort into their post. I hope that a members that made a good faith effort at an answer or question would not be voted down.
On the one hand, having the down vote encourages people to think a little more carefully about posting their question/answer, and it would provide people with a reason to try to search through the questions that have already been asked for their solution before posting a new question. On the other hand, I see how people may shy away from attempting to answer for fear of having it voted down. We intend to only allow down voting by people who have a moderate level or reputation, so brand new members would not be able to go down vote a lot of posts. I suspect that the downvote would be used most commonly on questions and answers where there was little effort made, especially if we only allow down voting by more experienced members. Do you guys have more thoughts on this'
Hi Heidita,
You bring up a great point. Voting for posts that are not good or useful lowers the quality of the site for everyone, and hopefully people that are on the site frequently do not wish to do this. We have seen a number of great sites where the voting system has been implemented with outstanding results: the members like it, the quality of the questions and answers are improved, and bad content gets much less attention. We are modeling our site on these systems. There are always ways that people will try to work around the system, but we think we have a few good ways of limiting this behavior.
Thanks for bringing up the issue,
Chris
Well if I am understanding you right, I think that anyone ought to be able to welcome a newbie, if that is what you meant and/or I understood you right.
I am sorry for these Johnny-come-lately posts. I am on the road and most of the time I cannot connect.
I think that the fist "Non-Administrator member" to reach 10,000 posts ought to be granted a full administrator title. That is just a suggestion. SO there now wont be a voting down idea, so okay.
Many members post legitimate questions and/or answers. Then, some members cannot pass a chance to post a welcome to a newcomer, perhaps to boast their reply count. I would say let the administrators and the future ambassadors send the welcome message, (if it is needed at all).
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Just an other opinion by me, no need to evaluate.
We are also going to allow members with enough reputation to flag posts that are spammy, commercial, inaccurate, or require moderator attention. These flagged posts will be brought to the attention of Heidi and Eddy. This will help ensure that we are able to feature that great posts while removing posts that detract from the site.
Could this flagged posts be hidden until Heidita or Eddy deemed them to be deleted or presented to all visitors? -- Just a thought...
I think that is the idea, and would be ideal. Otherwise, the only difference would be that "Reported" posts would now have a "flag" visible to all instead of just to Administrators, calling more attention to the undesirable.
I am extremely pleased that Chris has considered the thoughts of the members, but then I always knew he would. Like Heidi, I think the flagging facility would be extremely useful. I cannot wait to see the revamp.
¡¡Ha vuelto mi Eddy!! 
We are also going to allow members with enough reputation to flag posts that are spammy, commercial, inaccurate, or require moderator attention. These flagged posts will be brought to the attention of Heidi and Eddy. This will help ensure that we are able to feature that great posts while removing posts that detract from the site.
Could this flagged posts be hidden until Heidita or Eddy deemed them to be deleted or presented to all visitors? -- Just a thought...
We are going to do this with a thumbs up. So when you see a good response you can pass along kudos and give it an up vote.
Thumbs UP!
I am extremely pleased that Chris has considered the thoughts of the members, but then I always knew he would. Like Heidi, I think the flagging facility would be extremely useful. I cannot wait to see the revamp.
Yeah that should be so there wont be as many harassers.
