O My Captain is correct that he joined Questionland shortly after it was released in April of 2009.

In January of 2009, 3 guys from a fledgling Seattle based technology company approached Tim Keck of The Stranger to see if he wanted to use their technology on his website. Well, he didn't really like what they were selling but he really did like the 3 guys and they made him really delicious coffee so he decided to hang out with them for a few hours and see if they could come up with something that he did like. That day, Questionland was born as the place Seattlite's would go to ask all their difficult questions like "Where can I find a good plumber?" or "Who's got a good selection of women's boots?" or "Where can I get a good Falafel in this town?".

While the 3 technology guys were building Questionland, Tim and his colleague Anthony set to working on Questionland's style and character which they described as a "Broken Down Theme Park". Enter the Mushroom and Gnome. Discovered from the last page of Google images, cleaned up, and given center stage of Questionland.com.

On April 1st, 2009, Questionland.theStranger.com was born and took off wildly. About a year later, Questionland took on a new home at Questionland.com and a new "woodsy" design. Then, in October of 2011, Questionland decided to take itself a little more seriously, moved the Mushroom and Gnome from the front office to the back and redesigned with a cleaner, more polished look and feel. The rest, as they say, is history.

Hey Sacrelicious,

We had to back out a bunch of votes over the weekend due to an isolated case of voting abuse so the scores and ranking got shuffled around a bit. I'm in the process of correcting the -1's so they should be fixed soon. Thanks and sorry for the confusion.

Marty

What I want to know is, WHY THE HELL HAVEN'T YOU DONE A CONTROLLED STUDY? Or at least built a spreadsheet or something. Hmmpfh. Call yourself OCD.

So if you give Russ a mushroom for his answer here, that should push the moderator answers lower in the queue, no? Only one way to find out.

Here's a breakdown of the Follow feature. I believe that there is a bug that is responsible for the double notifications which I am looking into:

Notifications
Follow categories to be notified of new questions in the category.
Follow questions to be notified of new answers and comments in the question.
Follow people to be notified of new questions and answers by the person (not comments).

Auto-Follow
Answering a question or commenting on an answer will automatically "Follow" that question. You can always "Unfollow" the question to stop getting notified.

Follow Counts
The number next to the "Follow" is the how many people are following the particular item. We only show the number when it's more than 1. The green "F" icon in your reputation is the number of people that are following your questions since you get reputation points for these. See the reputation help page for more info on this.

Bug
You should only receive one notification per post (e.g. If you're following both Fnarf and a question that Fnarf answers, you should only receive his answer in one email notification. This is the bug I'm looking into.)

Let me know if this makes sense and if you have any other questions.
Thanks, Marty

Thanks for catching that. It's a bug. I will inform the Gnome and see if I can get rid of them manually in the meanwhile.

You should see a "edit" link in the byline but it's only there for 15 minutes. After that just comment here with your changes and I'll get 'em posted.

I think that people who hunt and fish and cut down trees in order to sustain themselves* are probably living a more environmentally sound lifestyle than people who eat meals mostly bought at the supermarket or restaurants, even those who are eating vegan or vegetarian meals bought in those places. And as for everybody else, my experience is that someone who is actually providing himself (or a whole family) with meat is eating a lot less of it than the average city omnivore. As long as you are actually using what you're taking from the natural world and not just killing stuff for the hell of it and practicing sustainable hunting/harvesting, I say go for it. (Of course, I spent the first six years of my life in a cabin without running water or electricity in the woods of North Idaho, making almost no environmental footprint whatsoever, so I *could* be an idiot who knows nothing about ethics in the modern world.)

*All comments null and void if you live in the city with no garden, drive a huge SUV to work and Starbucks, take 4-wheelers into the national forest, and are into hunting and cutting down trees because it makes you feel more capable/manly than everybody else.

It is snow. I do share your enthusiasm for Spring. It's almost here...

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=first+day+of+spring+2011

Hey Audiovore,
Your Facebook account uses a different email address than the one you used on Questionland so it couldn't make the association and, therefore, created a new Questionland account.

I fixed it so your Facebook account is now connected (and verified) to your first Questionland account.

Marty

We rarely have to censor anything and only do it when the contribution is offensive, spam, obviously useless or some combination thereof.

The reason we don't remove the associated reputation score is because the votes on the contribution are a reflection of people's view of that person's contribution to the community. If we removed the negative scores then we would be giving an inaccurate view of that the way that person is perceived.

It's not hard to negate a negative score by asking good questions and giving good answers. People are generally loathe to down-vote other people.

We monitor the voting to ensure that no one is arbitrarily voting down people they disagree with and will remove those if they occur. Otherwise a vote is a contribution just like an answer and we don't remove content unless it is necessary.

Thanks for asking. Hope that makes sense.

Mister Fusspot,

Thanks for the feedback. It's much appreciated.

1. Back Button.
It's at the top of our list.

2. Scrolling in box
On many phones if you use two fingers to scroll it'll work. Not intuitive (strange standard) and we need to create an alternative.

Our other biggie is to ad pictures! You got a camera in your pocket after all.

We are stretched v. thin and so it's going to take a while (unfortunately). We really don't want to charge for the app although we appreciate your willingness to pay for it.

Thanks again.

We will have the next one sometime in July. I still need to plan it.

This last one was focussed on the book club, so it was a pretty small bookish turn-out. The next one will be just a regular meet-up, and later in the day. (We heard from a few people that 5:30-7:30 was too early.)

Do you have suggestions for where you would like to hold a Questionland meet up?

How do people feel about a picnic outdoors?

Be sure to read the skyboxes at the top of the site. That's where we've been putting announcements about the special experts for the week, meet-ups etc. Also, if you Like us on Facebook you'll get announcements there.

I hope to meet you soon lilmonster206.

I LOVE that idea.
Rideshares fits perfectly with Questionland, because of the trust issue, as you say.

I will speak with the Gnome about this. And I will use my formidable powers to make it happen.

Thanks so much for suggesting it, and keep on chugging that Kool Aid. It's sweet isn't it?

Hi Kristin, I am the designer responsible for the art on Questionland. I am happy that you love it :)

Hi Russ,

It turns out that a bunch of those so spammers post pictures as well. They are quite adept at sign-ups and typically are paid to do whatever it takes.

We are looking at various spam control methods as the amount increases. The important thing is that we don't cause our real community trouble in the process.

I'd talk about the methods we are planning, but if I did it would only make it easier to circumvent.

One of the reasons we get spammers (beyond being a popular site) is that they are under the misapprehension that posting their links here will be of some benefit to them. They are "no-follow" links which means that they won't be.

Thanks for the idea though and please if you have any others feel free to share because we are always looking for creative solutions to this kind of problem.

Sacrelicious and CrazyCat Lady,

First off, let me apologize for not answering Stinkbug's original question. Quite pathetic really. We'll do better.

Second, I agree with all your suggestions.

Followup on results: I'm not exactly sure how to implement this but I will confer with Gnome. It's a subject that we have discussed in the past. The simplest may be to have another section for "results" which can be completed after the mushroom is awarded.

Following a question: This is something we've wanted for a long time and it's simply been bumped in favor of things like mobile etc. But I know for a fact that the Gnome is dedicated to making this happen.

Awarding Mushrooms: You know that you can always give someone a mushroom and then change it later based on either a better answer or a better result. I know it's not great to give and then take away, but probably better than forgetting about it. In the end may the best answer win the mushroom, so when you have one that warrants a mushroom then award it and change it if something better comes along.

Commenting on a question: I know you didn't specifically bring this up but I think it would be good to be able to ask for clarification on a question (essentially a comment). THe only concern here is the desire to keep things as simple as possible and ensure that people don't make the mistake of answering a question in the clarification/comment area. But that's a simple usability issue which we should be able to solve.

So, when will it all happen? It's hard to give specifics because the list of things is long and the Gnome can only do so much. The best I can do for now is say that at a minimum they are all things we want to make happen and will do our best to release as soon as feasible.

Thanks for the feedback it is much appreciated and helps make sure that we stay focused on doing the right things.

I'll be back to you when I have spoken to the Gnome and have a better idea of timing.

Sorry Russ- we've gotten behind on Answer of the Week. We'll have a new one up today.

Hey Rev, your down-votes are at 420. I think you know what you must do to ease the pain of rejection.

I have. But there are a lot of people who just don't give out mushrooms. I wish they would. Wouldn't it be nice if one of the boxes at the top of the page was a reminder to award mushrooms?

I know you really meant it, rev.... LOL!

lt's editing. l agree it is a nifty trick, especially on a site that doesn't allow for personal messaging .

You can edit content for 15 minutes after you add it and then it's fixed. So in theory you could delete a question (remove the content) at that point, otherwise you can't.

The rationale behind this is:

1. People will answer your questions and if you delete it then you would also be deleting their answers. Clearly we can't let someone delete another persons content. We have discussed being able to delete a question before it is answered but it's never made the priority list (yet).

2. If you could edit or delete content after the fact then you would be changing the context of the "discussion" e.g. when someone refers to your answer or doesn't mention things you said to avoid repetition.

Hope that makes sense. We are always open to ideas/suggestions for making things better. I talk to the Gnome regularly (to the extent that guy talks) and as he likes to say: "It's great when someone ELSE comes up with a good idea now and then".

Rev,

Nice demo of the OCD.

I know the Gnome has things planned for minor refinement to the reputation system. The main one being to easily see the "stats" in terms of the last week/month rather than being limited to "all time".

I will suggest that he introduce other sorting filters (perhaps under an OCD tab) so that you (and only you?) could perform some more detailed analysis.

Keep in mind that we intentionally implemented a very simple reputation system in the belief that over-engineering it was of limited benefit and would potentially cause more confusion than value.

Thankfully, we are a close enough community that we intuitively know quite a bit about who is best at what regardless of what the numbers may say. I personally pay almost no attention to them.

The Gnome is hard at work at some very interesting and useful new additions (most prominently QL Mobile) and once he has moved on from that I'll see if he is open to reputation enhancements.

Thanks as always for your ongoing ideas, suggestions and participation. I'll still like you even when you get to a hundred shrooms.

In short: I emailed Charles. There's no button / self-adjusting one's handle in Qland.

some links that led me to take that course of action:

http://questionland.com/questions/10217-how-the-hell-do-i-change-my-username-on-questionland-i-dont-feel-comfortable
http://questionland.com/questions/15877-how-do-i-deactivate-my-questionland-account

Whatcha changing it to?

We haven't made it on there (yet) and have never requested (paid for!) an audit. You can see traffic reports (of varying accuracy) on quantcast and compete.

The stats have all recently become facocked due to the change in our URL from The Stranger subdomain to just Questionland. It's just starting to straighten out again.

If you are looking for some specific info I might be able to let you know since we track most of the stuff in Google Analytics.

Are you asking if there's Boolean search capability? (Similar to what's available for the Google search engine: (slog AND potatoes) NOT (questionland OR turkey) -- returns results that include the terms "slog" and "potatoes" but excludes any results from that also include either "questionland" or "turkey". I don't know if there's Boolean searching available -- one of the moderators would know.

Sometimes you can't find questions because they've simply been deleted by the author.

This is a great idea, and it's on the list!
We have a bunch of improvements we're working on (including a mobile version, coming pretty soon...) but this is one of our higher priorities.

Thanks for asking about it. We'll keep you posted when it's close.

Hey Cagey,

Unfortunately, we introduced a bug yesterday for about an hour that only affected IE users. Sorry for the scare.

Marty

offputting Q's and crazy people =
Qland's meat & potatoes