To that aim, I have opened up an account for OPIEWeb on Uservoice.com, a site developed specifically for reporting bugs and suggestions for web site projects like ours.

The concept is very similar to OPIEWeb itself. Everyone who visits has 10 votes they can spend on an idea, feature or problem they have encountered. The highest vote counts rise to the top of the screen in order to show what you, the OPIEWeb community, care about most. There are official ways for Jen and I to respond, and places for you to comment on existing suggestions if you want to expand or alter what the original post was.

Once we implement an idea or fix a problem which you voted on, you get your votes back to spend on other ideas.

Feel free to check it out: http://opieweb.uservoice.com.

I have gotten to recognize and value input from certain members on certain listservs. Not everyone on OPIEWeb has a real name posted, and besides profiles, no good way to check the source of the answer to the questions. It would take a lot of time on OPIEWeb for me to recognize folks I don’t already know (hi Russell) and determine whether I value their input. I know that sounds harsh, but research shows trust is built over time

Lisa, we couldn’t agree more. Since OPIEWeb allows for anonymous participation and does not require that people display their real names when asking or responding, there is a certain amount of faith involved with the replies you get. For now at least.

Part of what makes OPIEWeb tick is our reputation system. Users with high rep have proven themselves as reliable and knowledgeable within the OPIEWeb ecosystem. Users earn rep in a handful of ways:

• Ask Good Questions™. A Good Question™ has sufficient information for people to answer it, is clear enough that other users can understand what your underlying issue is, and is useful to other OPIEWebbers. While the following traits are welcome, you will notice that “challenging,” “difficult,” and “obscure” are not required to have a Good Question™. Every time an OPIEWebber up-votes your question, you earn 10 reputation points. If an OPIEWebber provides an answer that gets you through to a solution, you can earn 2 more points by accepting their answer (clicking on the check mark below the voting buttons).
• Provide Great Answers™ to regular questions. You will know a Great Answer™ when you see it. It will be clear, easy-to-read, concise, have references for any “facts,” and links to any additional information required to understand the response. Every time an OPIEWebber up-votes your answers, you earn 10 reputation points. If the OPIEWebber who asked the question accepts your response as the answer that helped them the most, you earn an additional 15 reputation points.
• Sometimes, users ask tough questions that they know will require anyone who attempts to answer it to go an extra mile for additional research or supporting materials. For these instances, OPIEWeb provides a Bounty system. The question asker pledges anywhere from 50 reputation points on up and OPIEWeb will put up an additional 50 reputation points towards the Bounty. The person who gets the accepted answer on the Bounty question gets the whole shebang added to their reputation score. Questions with a Bounty will show the award amount in a little oval in the question title. You can also see all Bounty questions under the “Featured” tab.

Over time, the users that contribute to OPIEWeb the most (by asking Good Questions™ and providing Great Answers™) will have the highest reputation in the system, and you can trust that posts from those folks will be clear and well founded. If the reputation number alone is insufficient to provide a basis of trust you can see any registered user’s OPIEWeb history by clicking on their display name. All questions, answers and comments they have provided are browse-able there in the user profile. (Incidentally, The Russell that Lisa references is Russell Mathews, who just happens to currently have the highest reputation score).

With all these ways to earn reputation and with reputation being so important to gaining authority in OPIEWeb you would expect that there may be some fraud here or there. To combat that, OPIEWeb has a strict 250 point per day rep cap in place (a day is defined as being between 12:00 am UMT and 11:59pm UMT). Any up votes after you have earned 250 rep will not generate any additional rep.
Administrators, moderators and users with reputation of 10,000 have tools at their disposal to quickly dispatch unscrupulous users.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Do you think that OPIEWeb’s reputation score maps to real word trust? Answer in the comments below, or via email at OPIEWeb@Gmail.com.

This is the third edition in a series highlighting the tools and capabilities that set OPIEWeb’s Q&A section apart from listservs and regular discussion boards. To see the complete series of Feature Spotlight articles, click here. – RA

There was a big push a few years ago in the clothing industry to go tag-less. Well, we’re bringing back the humble tag. Call it retro. Call it bold. Call it daring. Call the police if someone removes your tag under penalty of law. Whatever. Its all good here at OPIEWeb.

Tags are useful little things. On OPIEWeb, we classify questions using up to 5 different keywords we call tags. Tags are searchable, combinable and can be subscribed to via RSS just like a newspaper or email list.

By properly tagging your questions with relevant keywords, you will not only attract more knowledgeable users to your question, but also make it easier for people with similar questions to find yours and any answers you have attracted.

On your user profile page, under the “prefs” tab, you can even tell us what tags you want to ignore, and which tags you really want to see more of. Any questions tagged with tags in your “Interested List” will be a bit brighter on the question page. Items in the ignore list will be dimmed or can even be excluded entirely from view. It’s up to you.

Tags are so important to OPIEWeb that we even have a silver badge for creating a new tag that others find useful. And, one of the first abilities that users get as they gain reputation is the power to re-tag questions they didn’t even ask!

So, go forth, eat, tag and be merry.

This is the second edition in a series highlighting the tools and capabilities that set OPIEWeb’s Q&A section apart from listservs and regular discussion boards. To see the complete series of Feature Spotlight articles, click here. – RA

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. That meaningless description aside, RSS is really useful, and our site makes judicious use of it. What it essentially boils down to is that OPIEWeb (and OPIEBlog too) are constantly updating these descriptive lists, which can be read by desktop programs like Microsoft Outlook 2007, FeedReader, or Web-based readers like Google Reader, and many, many (many) more. By subscribing to one of these lists, you get email-like notifications whenever something new is added.

Lets say, for example, that you are a stats geek. Stop protesting, there is nothing wrong with being a stats geek. I’m married to one. Now, as a stats geek you would be really interested in making sure that people know how to plot an ANOVA in SPSS using just syntax, understand centering (not that kind of centering, the kind where you readjust your dataset to… never mind), etc. So you subscribe to the RSS feed (thats what we call the lists in the computer geek world by the way) for the SPSS or statistics or ANOVA tags using, say, Outlook. Now, whenever someone posts a new answer with one of those tags, Outlook will let you know about it.

OPIEWeb has separate RSS feeds for every single tag. Even if you just created a new question that has a tag no one else has used before, that new tag has its own feed. So does your question for that matter. You can subscribe to a question and be alerted whenever a new answer or comment is posted on it. You can even subscribe to the entire list of questions so whenever a new one is added, you are the first to know. Okay, among the first to know. There is also a separate feed for every registered user. so if you’re as obsessive about reputation points and badges as I am, you can track that too.

Subscribing to an RSS feed is like subscribing to a newspaper, only there is no paper boy to tip and if you want to cancel, no one will pressure you to re-subscribe. We don’t even charge extra for Sundays. The processes varies slightly depending on which reader you use, but in general, you click some button to add a new feed. You enter the url of the feed, the software will attempt to read the feed, then you given some additional options on notifications and display and you’re done. To get the blog feed, the url is http://opieblog.opieweb.com/feed/. For the 30 newest questions in all tags, use http://opieweb.com/feeds. For users feeds or specific tags, you will need to see a link in the bottom right corner of their pages for finding the feed as these are generated by the system.

So, thats the spotlight on RSS. Subscribing to our many, many (many) feeds isn’t necessary in order to enjoy OPIEWeb (or OPIE Blog), but its nice to know they are there. You could of course, just visit the site every day.

This is the first edition in a series highlighting the tools and capabilities that set OPIEWeb’s Q&A section apart from listservs and regular discussion boards. To see the complete series of Feature Spotlight articles, click here. – RA

OPIEweb has its own “pieces of flair.” We call them badges and chances are that as a registered OPIEWebber, you already have some.

Most users first encounter badges when they fill out all of the fields in their profile after registering. For that simple act you are awarded the ● Autobiographer badge.

There are 3 classifications of badges and just like in the Olympics, they come in bronze, silver and gold. Bronze badges are common and it is not unusual to see a user with dozens of these on well established sites. Silver are a bit harder to come by. A typical user may have between 10 and 15 silver badges after a year or so on OPIEWeb. Gold badges are very difficult to come by. Some users will accumulate a few of these over the next year, but not all.

Why do we do this? Well because its fun, mostly. OPIEWeb’s badge system is based on trophies/achievements/badges found in modern video games. Badges are our way of thanking you for being a good OPIEWeb citizen. They reward you for doing things that we want to encourage (hurray for positive reinforcement!) which make OPIEWeb a better place to be. This is separate from reputation which is a metric of trust, but more on that later.

You’ll find a general list of badges here that anyone can earn throughout their time on OPIEWeb. Many can be awarded to you multiple times. There is also a badge for every single tag used on OPIEWeb. If you earn 400 up-votes on non-Community Wiki questions with those tags, you can earn a silver badge for that tag marking you as an expert in that subject. Earn 1,000 up-votes and you get the coveted gold badge.

We don’t tell you where you are in your progression towards a badge. This is on purpose. We like it to be a surprise when you have left enough comments to earn the ● Commentator badge or visited the site every day for 100 days straight to get your ● Fanatic badge.

So how many pieces of flair do you have?