Rewriting the QA Section

So you may have noticed the language selector on the Account Settings page. I am currently rewriting the QA section of the site. The new version will allow you to ask questions in different categories and languages. Here are some things you may be able to look forward to:

• The new ask page will be AJAX based. That means every single thing you do won't cause the page to reload which, as I understand, was quite an annoyance before.
• Your questions will be neatly arranged in a grid on the bottom portion of the page. The answers you receive are collapsable and will update in real-time.
• The rating system will go away. It didn't work very well since no one really rates questions up. As such, over time, everyone's rating eventually fell to the teens if you were good and into the single digits if you were bad. Generally. Not always. Instead of a rating system, there will be several categories that you can ask your question in. There will be a section for people that want serious answers, another section for mature topics, another section for random silliness, etc. Users will be able to select which categories they want to receive questions from. Users that continually abuse the categorization system can be banned from asking questions in that category, but not banned from the QA system altogether. Hopefully this will help curtail the mindless drivel or Omegle-esque situations many of you have been complaining about.
• Like I said, there will be a way to set your current language to ask/answer questions in that language. Eventually this setting may translate the UI for the site, but for now, the site itself will remain in English.
• The questions will be presented to you with the most recently asked question first. When you skip a question, you skip it for good. It will never come back again.
• Here's the important one that's some of you may not like, but is somewhat necessary given the size that TwoCans has grown to: questions will only be active for 1 day. After a question has been exposed to answerers for 1 day, it moves to your inactive pile. Back in the day when I was forced to delete everyone's answers, it was because the database was too large and the SQL query that determines what questions to show you next was causing the whole MySQL server to go down since it was getting too cumbersome. If the pile of questions only consists of questions that have been around for a day, this situation will never arise again. It shouldn't affect the number of answers you get since most questions (ignoring the random flukes) don't receive many answers after several minutes and rarely any at all after a few hours. You will still be able to browse your old questions and even re-activate them if you wish. This should significantly reduce the workload on the server.

So there you have it. That's what I'm working on this weekend and possibly the next. When I purged all the questions the database was roughly the same size as it is now, so without these optimizations, TwoCans has become a ticking time bomb that could go off any second. Have a nice day!

Things

Welcome to the Admin's Blog. I or the other admins will post things of interest here. They will range from system announcements, future feature discussions, things that are too verbose for the FAQ, or completely random nonsense my brain comes up with that you will have to endure.

It'll be fun.

If you want me to discuss something in particular or post about a particular topic, feel free to message me.