Current version by: Kyle Wiens

Text:

Status:

open

Edit by: Kyle Wiens

Text:

Status:

open

Original post by: Kyle Wiens

Text:

Thank you very much for your blunt feedback, Nick. I appreciate it. Really! I'm sorry that it took me a few days to write a response. I have been traveling. I definitely read your post all the way to the end!

Let me address your concerns and suggestions one at a time.

I'm thrilled that the reason that you help people is ''"user ignorance, since [without your input] they won’t attempt a repair and will probably throw it out."'' I think this is precisely right. There is also an element of subversive culture change: If we help people fix something once, then maybe they'll come back and pass it along to the next guy.

=== Passing the love along ===

Let's brainstorm how to fix this together. I want to solve some of these problems.

''''Call me crazy, greedy or any other name in the book but when I give my time away to help someone else out, I expect the people I give my time away to at least respond to show they appreciate my support.'''' You're not crazy, this is fair. Let's see what we can do about it.

Let me address your five suggestions one at a time.

=== Answer accept rate ===

'''Nobody seems to mark the answers on iFixit who solved the problem.''' I know that people don't accept as many answers as we like. In some cases, it's because the asker is leaving us high and dry. That's not always the case. When I ask questions, sometimes I can't accept the answer because:

# I haven't fixed it yet. I don't feel comfortable accepting an answer until I solve the problem. I need to read your answer, try the proposed solution, then go back and mark it accepted.
# The solution, no matter how good, didn't fix the issue. Yes, this answer might fix things for other people, but it didn't work for me.

But those situations aren't the norm, and we still want more questions accepted. Here's the data:

The user acceptance rate is under 10%. That's lower than it's ever been, and it's unacceptably low. We are going to prioritize solving this above all the other issues below. I want to get this back to 25% by the end of July.

Once approach that Stack Overflow takes is to display the 'accept rate' on member's profile pages. This helps for dedicated members, but not for more 'transitory' members.

=== Email reminders ===

'''3 e-mail reminders are required at the most''' I agree, one email reminder probably isn't good enough. I don't know the right number of emails to send. Perhaps we can experiment. A perverse part of me wants to keep sending them emails until they take ''some'' kind of action, but that's probably too extreme. We will try to do something.

=== Penalizing non-response ===

'''I would also dare say take a small amount of reputation away from people who ignore a question''': I don't think this is a good idea. Negative incentives rarely work. They tend to discourage rather than encourage. I'd rather instill a 'Do a good turn daily' perspective with these folks.

=== Improved leaderboards ===

''Another option would be to have a Users and Staff tab, to help signal iFixit is community run, too.''' I completely agree. We're going to do this. Soon. (Yes, Mayer, you were right and we were wrong.)

=== Certifications on profiles ===

'''Certifications!''' I think these are awesome. We want to see more certifications listed. Give us a list of certifications that you like and we'll add them to the list.

=== One more thing: ===

'''iFixit Swag''' — we have been bereft in this area of late. We want to make progress on this again. To kick things off, we've got some new t-shirt designs. I will be sending an email to everyone with over 1000 rep in the last year with a coupon to grab one of the new designs as soon as we get them in the store.

I would like to institute 'Random Acts of Swag.' Every month, we'll randomly hand out 5 apparel coupons to people with over 100 new rep. And for every 10,000 reputation you earn, you get the ability to give a Thank-You badge and a coupon to someone else in the community.

Oh, and we're working on redesigning your profile pages. I can't promise a date yet, but we've got some sweet mockups in the lab. Soon!

I know we need to do a better job of keeping you guys in the loop as we develop new features. We care deeply about making iFixit a fun and rewarding place to hang out. I think we have a lot of room for improvement, and I'm planning on making substantial progress this summer.

Status:

open