I took care of it for you sphinx...

In an effort to keep things as positive as possible, perhaps public humiliation is not the best approach.

Can a trusted friend (that is you, moderators) pull the offenders aside and ask politely that they limit their number of answers?

also, the little gnome's lantern lights up!

There's no easy way but it would be a nice feature (no pun intended) to add. Will put it on the list.

Marty

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?

Yes. We've been fixing some data issues lately and it may have resulted in your vote totals changing. We have a bit more to do so I apologize in advance for the ups and downs (double meaning intended) that results in changing stats.

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

I think you mean "get with 2003".

Besides, you're almost certainly thinking of something really disgusting. Aren't you? Admit it.

The fine print at the bottom says: 

Questionland was incubated at The Stranger Hatchery from a YouSaidIt egg. Questionland was released into the wild on August 1st, 2010.

Seems as though QLand has spun off from the mother ship at this point. 

No bother at all. We can do it on the home page because it's a page everyone sees and is optimized (cached) for speedy delivery. It's harder to do on an individual's page without slowing it down too much but I like your idea to anchor to the green bar after the reload as an incremental improvement.

And, yes, Questionland FAQ is exactly the right place for this question. Thanks!

I've thought it of a few posts, but most of the ones that don't get flagged are pretty clever about hiding it inside actual questions.

That question awhile ago about the SIFF made me think it was a promoter for the festival. Other things like that that I have seen, but don't recall off the top of my head.

I am sure they know we can see through the bullshit, but it is all about snagging 1 in every 1,000. The same way that spam actually works - you send out 500,000 emails, of those only 100,000 actually read it, and of those only 1 in 1,000 respond - you still get yourself a fair number of hits for very little effort.

Lame, but it makes sense.

Can you mail it to a friend who lives in or visits Seattle?

I use Firefox and/or Chrome at home, but I'm at work now and I just tested it out. You're right - the button doesn't work in IE8. This is because Internet Explorer is a worthless piece of crap.

I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.

/pythongeek

It doesn't seem necessary or even accurate to me.

Sure, there are lots of Seattle-centric topics on this board, but there are also topics which are fairly universal. And we have plenty of regulars who aren't even from Seattle, so it seems we expand beyond a Seattle-centered appeal.

It also looks a tad crowded. But it certainly isn't a big deal "OMG REDESIGN" issue.

I'll put it in the fix/enhance hopper.

It's a good point and it' should be fixed. Unless perhaps Questionland is a place where one should be faced with these moral questions.

I'm sure nobody would suspect you of masturvoting.

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

Fnarf,

I am one of the many gnomes behind Questionland and the subscription email in particular.

First, I apologize for the (unintentional) spam. I agree with your definition. I think, in the absence of all other factors, email should be an opt-in thing. Also, the unsubscribe could have been clearer, although there is a one click unsubscribe at the bottom.

This is our first stab at something like this and the intention was good even if the execution was somewhat flawed. We felt that most people would be interested in knowing about Questionland events without checking back and we wanted to broaden the audience for some of the tougher questions while rewarding people for answering them. (Two people have already answered the "stumper" which was an exceptionally hard one).

There's no excuse for spamming people, but as you know, we also send people emails with answers to their questions and we opt them in automatically. We do this to simplify the registration and reduce the confusion. Everyone seems to be happy with that aspect of being emailed and we simply continued the practice in this case. In most cases I think it ends up being easier and more beneficial for people, but in some cases (too many?) it is spam.

You are a great friend of Questionland and I'm sorry for the screw up. We plan to send these to update people on the weekly events and I imagine that after this first one anyone who doesn't want it will have opted out, so hopefully we won't be spamming anyone.

You clearly have a great deal of experience in this domain, so if you have advice for the future emails please let me know. You can reach me at charles@questionland.com.

Again, sorry for the spam and thanks for the feedback.

I've advocated for non-votable follow-up questions or comments on the original question since the beginning of QL. The Stack Overflow platform allows for it and I think it works well. I find that the answers section is heavily abused by people asking follow up questions, or just writing comments without actually answering the question. It clutters the answers section and attracts frivolous downvotes. The answers section should be for genuine attempts at answering the question, and personally I think non-answers or follow-up questions placed there should be deleted by moderators on sight.

The problem would also be mitigated if we could just edit our posts indefinitely.

This page sort of explains it:
http://questionland.thestranger.com/static/reputation_help

Basically it's a combination of your upvote/downvote ratio, the number of mushrooms you have, and the number of featured posts you have. I'm not sure if volume actually contributes, other than the fact that you have to have a lot of posts in order to get the number of upvotes and mushrooms necessary to land you on the "top contributors" page.

I have used Basil for a screen name / video game name for years. Here are all the reasons I stick with it:

1. I love cooking. Basil is awesome.

2. My undergrad degree was history - I studied the Byzantine empire and traveled throughout the old empire, from Eastern Europe, to Constantinople (Istanbul), to the heart of Turkey. One of the best emperors from the Byzantine empire was named Basil. He rose from being a lowly peasant to being one of the great emperors (or so the story goes), which has always appealed to me on a personal level.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_I

3. Although not why I chose the name when I first started using it, I was told I had to watch Fawlty Towers if I was going to use the name Basil - which I came to enjoy. The main character there is named Basil Fawlty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Fawlty

Now Basil the Blessed I had not heard of before, but I like his style.

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

The pic is from a photo shoot l did with a friend. The mask is actually leather, it's just the lighting. Other than the zit l currently have on my nostril, no disfiguration. Plus l like a little anonymity. :)

You Kristin, we would meet at a party at a mutual friend's house and be the last ones awake then we would talk all night smoking too many cigarettes and drinking Green Lakes and eventually PBR, which we'd laugh about since we had just been talking shit abut PBR like an hour ago but you'd remember that you read on a blog somewhere that it was vegan and so it can't be that bad. Then all of the sudden we'd be all like "woah! how is it light out already?", the conversation would change to something really transparent and awkward then just fizzle into an uncomfortable silence. That's when we'd look at each other and giggle and move our faces closer then back, then closer again and all of the sudden we're kissing. We make out for a while and we're about to do it even though neither of us ever does that sort of thing, not that we're judgemental it's just that for us..y'know, and we do know. BUT THEN right as our hands are finally starting to work their way up each other's skirts everyone wakes up and before you know it we're going to breakfast with like 6 other people and I'm practically sitting in your lap at the restaurant but everyone is too hungover to notice. But then when b-fast is over we're both exhausted from no sleep and we have stuff to do and we're both afraid of rejection so we go our seperate ways. And then later that day you get and unexpected phone call from your almost ex-lover that you've been taking a break with for the last month and you two rekindle your relationship and you never say anything about us, which is fine 'cuz it was barely anything. We start running into each other a lot more and become peripheral characters in each others lives but we never talk about the night we kissed or tell anyone else.

I've always felt more like a question than an answer, if we all boil down to that binary.

I think we tend to provide more answers than questions because it is easier to regurgitate acquired knowledge than think in new directions. The whole peacock tail/disco ball thing is just human behavior on the internet.

When it comes down to our universal existential concerns, we are all questions looking for an answer.

Well, hmm. Good question.

My initial reaction was to say that answering a question was harder, but then I thought: "You know, there are often many ways in which to answer a question, but only a particular question that will get you the sort of answer you want."

I think this is an excellent suggestion.

Work is babelfish good definitely

Yeah, this shows some of QuestionLand's flaws.

- They need faster moderation action. Some of these spam questions were reported as spam 10 hours ago but the questions and accounts are still up.

- New accounts (and maybe all accounts) need to be limited to one question/day for the first week or so.

We have moderators, yes! I'm sorry about the spam. We're cleaning it up right now.