6

I'm sure you all have seen my challenges. They've been up for the last three months (Jan-Feb-Mar-2016). I want to come up with a challenge for April, so would truly love your input.

Please post ideas for the April Challenge as an answer to this question. Information I need is:

  • What is the challenge?
  • How many of my <cough> hard earned points should be awarded when completed?
  • How long does the individual have to complete the challenge? (Should this just be for April or maybe it should be April-May?)
  • What should this challenge be names?
  • Why this would be a good challenge and what would it accomplish.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you all have. Please don't think I'm obligated to even post a challenge. I may use what you've posted, but I may embellish it as well, making it my own. No worries though, I always try to give credit where credit is due!

2

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
3

I think that some challenges may be able to be reused but it would cooler if we had something that was fresh.

Suggested Challenges

Since I'm vote freak I would like to see challenges that get people to vote.

  • New User Challenge - Perhaps a Civic-Duty badge challenge so that new users can participate and they get in the habit of voting and understand why it's important.

  • Been Around for a Bit Challenge for users that have been around and know a little about how the site works a challenge regarding Editing Old Questions The benefit to this is that the search engine bots see change in the site. Site change and changing content are metrics that are ranked highly by search engines. Search engines that see improvement in content, such as spelling errors, syntax, capitalization and better/easier readability will provide a higher ranking for that content and potentially a higher ranking directing more traffic at us. Awarding some rep for Strunk & White could be good for the site. As well the Archaeologist badge could also benefit the overall site quality as the old content that has poor editing (there is a lot of it out there) can get remediated and perhaps some votes can get applied to some of that older content. This also helps users that are involved in the sites success to become considerably more familiar with some of the really amazing questions and answers that have built up in here over the years.

  • Been Around for Awhile If a user has been around for awhile and really understands the site and has great knowledge extending the tag-wiki challenge could be great. The are still a ton of wiki's that NEED content and awarding for Research Assistant certainly has a lot of site benefits.

  • Veteran Challenge Perhaps one of the more difficult badges such as Copy Editor, which is pretty hard to get if you aren't close but there are some vets that aren't far away from it. As well, for those of us that ask questions Inquisitive could be a great way to generate a QPD number as well as getting more questions in the cue that are useful links for future questions.

1
  • You are the Man! These are great suggestions. Thank you as always, kind Sir!
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Mod
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 10:05
8

I think we're still short of people voting (and voting well), so I'd suggest something vote-count related (something like best improvement on vote-to-rep-ratio), but it'd need to be done in a way to make people think about what they're voting on, not just vote on anything and everything to get their vote-count up...

8
  • Good idea, take my vote! ;-)
    – Kromster
    Commented Mar 14, 2016 at 11:14
  • Can you flesh this idea out? Like how do we track this? I definitely agree with a better voting aspect. I just need to know how to get it done.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2016 at 18:19
  • Hmm, well it's easy to get the list of users sorted by votes: mechanics.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Voters&filter=quarter
    – Nick C Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2016 at 10:39
  • and I think the API has a thing to get users sorted by votes-to-rep ratio - one of the reports was something like 'low voters'
    – Nick C Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2016 at 10:40
  • so screenshot of one or both of those before and after should allow measurement, but I'm not sure how to enforce the 'no spurious voting' thing...
    – Nick C Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2016 at 10:41
  • Spurious voting is very arbitrary (depends on your POV) and no way to enforce by my thinking.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Mod
    Commented Mar 15, 2016 at 14:30
  • Dude, voting is DOWN this week and it's been falling but I bet it's back to Nov. numbers. Obviously no facts to back that claim, it's just my gut feeling.
    – DucatiKiller
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 0:36
  • I'm going to dig in the data grinder thing and see if I can pull some reports, I'll paste em up in here if I can.
    – DucatiKiller
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 0:39
4

April/May is usually the time of year when air-conditioning questions start to flood the site.

What if we had a competition to see who can contribute the most to the tag in terms of questions and answers?

You may need to take stock of the initial rankings to see the true delta by the end of the month.

2
  • Not a bad idea!
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Mod
    Commented Mar 30, 2016 at 10:44
  • @zaid How could we track this? Could we use the data explorer to nail down where we are at and see the delta at the end of the month?
    – DucatiKiller
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 3:13
3

I think we should also promote good questions from new users as there seem to be a lot of questions that are quite difficult to answer or understand at the moment.

We could promote some sort of review based challenge, or to improve x number of new questions.

To clean up some tags. There are lots of blank tags at the moment, which leads to the wrong tags being used by new users who aren't as good with the system.

5
  • 1
    Not a bad suggestion. The easiest way to track anyone's progress is through a badge challenge. As NickC is trying to promote above, there are ways to track in other ways as well, but not nearly as neat or efficient. As for the tags, one of the three challenges I have up right now are to accomplish that ... The Research Assistant badge. What else are you thinking? Maybe flesh your idea out a little bit, but promoting voting should be the major theme here.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Mod
    Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 22:59
  • Maybe we could promote more downvoting on poor answers as well as upvotes. Lots of answers that aren't very good don't seem to have many downvotes, which could obviously cause issues for people trying stuff with their cars. It seems a bit harsh, but fair as you don't want people to mess up their cars
    – George
    Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 23:00
  • I see your point. The only reason I'd not want to follow that pursuit is not voting on terrible Q/As works almost as well and doesn't drive people off. If someone thinks they are getting serially downvoted, it becomes demoralizing and they may not want to come back. Something I'd have to think about, but besides that, how would you verify someone has been downvoting? Only the raw downvote score is shown and it would encourage downvoting where it might not be warranted. Seems like it might be a double edged sword. I never try to tell people how to vote, but just to vote.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Mod
    Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 23:06
  • Yeah, fair enough I suppose. I was just suggesting this as there don't seem to be as many downvotes, but I do not know a good way to implement this without there being a double-edged sword.
    – George
    Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 23:08
  • Thank you for your input. I'll think about it and see if there is some way to incorporate what you are thinking about here.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Mod
    Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 23:14

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .