the official blog

Posted by Darren
Dec 14, 2009
(0) Comments

Topic: Background

Living with the Launch

Right up until the day we launched WPQuestions, we were adding new features. Originally we had planned to launch the site in October, but other issues arose. I’m glad we pulled the trigger when we did. If you look at our to-do list, it’s obvious we could have spent the next 2 months adding those features and analyzing the site like scientists in a lab.

This post by Jeff Atwood (“Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway“) affirms why letting go of perfectionism is a must if you’re ever going to launch the site, get your feet wet, swallow your pride and start learning from your users:

The velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback will set the tone for your software, far more than any single release ever could. That’s what you need to get good at. Not the platonic ideal of shipping mythical, perfect software, but being responsive to your users, to your customers, and demonstrating that through the act of continually improving and refining your software based on their feedback. So to the extent that you’re optimizing for near-perfect software releases, you’re optimizing for the wrong thing.

There’s no question that, for whatever time budget you have, you will end up with better software by releasing as early as practically possible, and then spending the rest of your time iterating rapidly based on real world feedback.

Posted by Darren
Dec 14, 2009
(3) Comments

Topic: News

The First Week for WPQuestions

A week after its launch, I’m happy to say WPQuestions has gotten overwhelming positive feedback and healthy traffic. The community has reached 300+ registered members who are beginning to accumulate earnings. This exceeded our expectations.

It felt especially tricky to launch this project within a development community like WordPress where issues like premium themes and GPL issues are debated heavily and treated with scrutiny. It was a good omen to have the encouragement of friends like Ian Stewart, Justin Tadlock, Adii, Jean-Baptiste Jung and Nathan Rice, all of whom influence the WordPress universe with their work and opinions.

Squashed Bugs

As expected, there were a few issues with pasting PHP into replies and escaping the code properly, so we fixed that and made the answer-editing process easier which is addressed below in “Added Features”. There was a hitch or two in the money-withdrawal process which was cleared up pretty quickly.

We also realized some of the FAQ needed clarification in regard to PayPal. In short, your PayPal info is not stored in WPQuestions. You can use separate accounts for different questions if you choose.

New Features

Here are some things we’ve added since the launch:

  1. A lowered minimum price. Ultimately, we realized the value of a question should be determined by the participants without Lawrence or I imposing anything. The Asker can now ask a question for as low as $4 theoretically, but will do so knowing that the amount of money offered may affect the quality of the Answer. And Experts should ultimately only answer questions they feel are worth their time. They are encouraged to be vocal if they feel an Asker should be offering more money for a question. Over time, we hope this will help define standards within the community.
  2. Ability to edit answers. There is now an ‘Edit’ button which lets you edit answers you have given. But what’s to prevent people from abusing the system by changing their answer….
  3. Answer versioning. Changes made to answers are now recorded in our database in case there is a dispute. Versioning may be added to the public interface eventually. And if the Asker needs to see them…
  4. Email alerts for edits. The Asker now receives an email if an Expert changes his answer so that tabs can be kept on what changes were made and when.
  5. Email alerts for answers. Askers now get an email when new answers are posted.
  6. “Best Answer” styling. When a question gets archived, it’s only visible to Asker and Experts who participated in it. Old questions can be viewed via the control panel and winning answers are now marked with a beige background and green check mark.

To-Do List

  1. Archive subscriptions. Once the archive is more heavily populated, we will offer a subscription-based plan for unlimited access to old questions and answers.
  2. Twitter integration. Our Twitter account will soon be tweeting recently asked questions so that Twitter addicts can be alerted more quickly.
  3. In-thread Asker replies. Right now there is now way for you, the Asker, to reply to answers. Hopefully we will devise something that’s more like WP’s threaded comments that lets the Asker clarify.
  4. Business PayPal account. We will get an official WPQuestions business account with PayPal rather than using Lawrence’s personal account.
  5. Expert karma rankings. Using a star system, we’ll make it possible to rank Experts by the quality of answers they give. This will especially serve developers who are building a reputation and want to point others to their accomplishments.
  6. Tiers of urgency. There are some questions which are only useful if answered in a short period of time like 1-12 hours and the money offered (and fees) will vary accordingly. We hope to implement something that will allow more fine-tuning if necessary.
  7. More question-and-answer sites! Ultimately, we will continue learn from feedback given by WPQuestions users. As that feedback is gathered, processed and implemented, we will also refine the feature-set and begin launching identical sites for other communities like Javascript, Ruby, Objective C and so on.
  8. Software sales. We have already gotten lots of questions about the creation of WPQuestions which Lawrence did skillfully with the Symfony framework. We are considering packaging the results, adding more features and selling software licenses for users to set up their own contest/question-and-answer based sites.

As always, if you’ve got feedback positive or negative, please let us know.

Posted by lawrence
Dec 09, 2009
(3) Comments

Topic: Background

A clarification about PayPal accounts

Several people have written to ask what sort of relationship exists between their WP Questions accounts and their PayPal account. I apologize that we did not do a better job explaining this. The answer is that there is no relationship.

Some people thought that if they wanted to ask a question, they needed to use the same email address on WP Questions as they use with PayPal. The answer is no, not at all.

Your PayPal account is separate from your WP Questions account. Once you ask a question, you will be taken to PayPal. At that point, you can type in any account info that you choose. We do not store your PayPal info. If you used one PayPal account one day (to pay for a question), but then a different account a different day (to pay for a different question), we would not automatically know. We could piece it together if we wanted to, by looking to see what user id is associated with the question being paid for, but my point is we do not explicitly tie your questions to any particular PayPal account.

There is one situation where you will need to have your WP Questions email address associated with a PayPal account: if you are an expert and you have won money by answering questions. When you make a withdrawal from WP Questions we send the money, via PayPal, to whatever email address you are using for your WP Questions account. So, at some point, you’ll want that email address to be attached to a PayPal account.

How do you get your money? If you are an expert and you’ve won some money by answering questions, go to your user dashboard and withdraw the money. Look for the words “Withdraw cash to PayPal?”. If you have a balance of $100 in your WP Questions account, you could type 100 into that form, then hit the “Withdraw Cash” button, and the money will be sent via PayPal to whatever email address is associated with your WP Questions account.

Those of you who are simply asking questions are free to use one email address on this site, and an entirely different email address on PayPal.

If anyone ever needs to change the email address they are using for their WP Questions account, they can do so on their user dashboard.

By the way, you can also upload an avatar for your user account on that page. We encourage people to do so.

Finally, please note, our fees are in addition to the prize money. So if you are asking a question and you are putting up $20 as a prize, we will charge you $2.30 in addition (that is 9% plus 50 cents). So when our software redirects you to PayPal, you will be asked to pay $22.30.

Posted by lawrence
Dec 09, 2009
(11) Comments

Topic: Responses

Some responses to your questions and feedback

We are grateful to everyone who sent well wishes and feedback to WP Questions during our opening day. I was pleased, of course, that so many people seemed to think it was a good idea.

Hafiz Rahman wrote:

I like the well-defined rules on WPQuestions and how simple it is to ask and answer there.

Ian Steward had kind words:

Brilliant idea and brilliant execution.

Andrew Rickmann had kind words:

WP Questions is a great idea. I wasn’t sure at first but seeing a few questions has converted me.

Kulpreet Singh called us inevitable:

#WordPress paid question-answer. Inevitable: http://www.wpquestions.com

Aviva Johnson struck a non-committed note that really made me chuckle:

Curious to see if this takes off: WP Questions http://www.wpquestions.com

Hey, me too, Aviva! I’m really curious to see if this takes off!

Many people tried the site and sent us great feedback. Utkarsh posted an answer and notified us of a problem with the formatting of the HTML in the answers, which we fixed immediately.

Tom de Bruin sent us a detailed bug report, alerting us to the fact that sometimes HTML was visible on screen:

I noticed it happening a few times in various locations, on the top experts “+” bit and under the sponsor . When I’ve just looked the following has appeared on the front page:

?ui=2&view=att&th=1257035cb4bc9c21&attid=0.1&disp=attd&realattid=ii_1257035cb4bc9c21&zw

I’ve attached the ‘view source’ of that page. I haven’t been through it but thought it may help you track the error down.

I’ve seen this myself but I can not figure out the problem. It is fleeting, if you hit refresh it goes away – which makes it difficult to figure out what is going on. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks again, Tom. We are grateful to get such a detailed bug report.

There were certain questions that came up repeatedly. We’ve covered most of them on our About page, but I’ll offer a few quick responses here (these specific questions are from qwik3r, they are representative of other questions that we received):

1.) Do you make it mandatory for askers to put money in escrow? Otherwise they can just get the free answer and not pick anyone.

Yes, the askers pay first. The money is is there for the answerers. We worry about people possibly gaming the system, and we’ve taken measures to make that less likely.

2.) Do you have a feed for all questions so we can stay up to date quickly?

Yes, there is an RSS feed that shows all new questions.

3.) Are askers allowed to respond or post follow up questions after an expert has had the chance to possibly clarify their question?

The asker can edit their post to further clarify it, in response to clarifying questions they might get from potential answerers.

4.) Does pointing someone to a plugin count as answering a question?

Pointing to a plugin could be a good answer, if the plugin does everything the asker is looking for. The decision is usually up to the asker to decide.

Justin Tadlock posted an answer, first with a small error, and then again in corrected form. He pointed out the need for some way to edit the answers:

Ahh! Where’s the edit button? I posted the incorrect version. Please use this version instead

Others (Japh, Ron R, etc) made the same point to us. In fact, having some way to edit the answers was probably the single most requested feature that we heard about yesterday. This raises some issues of integrity and fairness, as someone might post a bad answer, and then later someone else posts a good answer, and the first answerer might edit their answer, based on the information offered in the later answer. Rzen was quick to point out the problem:

@justintadlock @darrenhoyt if you allow experts to edit make sure there is some way to display the revisons to prevent cheatery

We rely on the askers to be fair when they hand out the awards, and we have to have some faith that they will use good judgment. From a programming stand point, we can offer askers more information about who offered what information, and when. After some discussion, we decided that when someone posts an answer, the whole answer should be emailed to the asker (since this is not an advertising supported site, we do not face the typical pressure of trying to maximize the number of people going to the site). The emails will give the asker the full history of the answers they receive. We should have this implemented by Friday.

Stuart Duff wrote a thoughtful post about what we are trying to do. He made this interesting point about the pricing:

One of the things I noticed is currently the minimum price you need to set when asking for help is $20 (£12 UK) which seems a little on the high side to me. I know $20 isn’t necessarily a huge sum of money but it may be high enough to deter many from using this service, after all your only asking a question which could be available with a search on Google for free, right?. Alternatively you could ask for free help on any wordpress related support forum and probably receive the correct answer or be pointed in the right direction if you don’t mind waiting a few hours. On the flip side of this you do need to make the service worthwhile for people to participate and answer the questions in the first instance, a kind of catch 22 balancing act I suppose.

LiliekS also raised the issue of price:

20$ for a question and answer. Is it worth it?

We appreciate your feedback. I am sure in the months to come we will spend a lot of time thinking about the price issue.

I’ve been working on websites for 10 years, and I’m very pleased with how our first day went – much better than average. We received a lot of valuable bug reports and thoughtful feedback. I was pleased to see some questions posted. Our fees are 9% plus 50 cents. PayPal takes about 3% and 30 cents, so our net profit from yesterday was less than $10 dollars, but, hey, that means we made more on our first day than Twitter made during its first 2 years. Which leaves me hopeful that we are, in fact, offering a service that provides real utility to people. And as we listen to your feedback and implement the better ideas, we hope to be able to offer an even greater service in the future.

Posted by Darren
Dec 07, 2009
(2) Comments

Topic: Best Of, News

The Best of WPQuestions

Once a month, we will be picking the most useful or innovative questions from the WPQuestions archives and publishing them to the blog. Eventually we will also offer a subscription option for users who want access to the full archives.

Ultimately we’d like to help promote the hard work of Experts and help them with visibility as consultants, but also to publish the cream of the crop WordPress tutorials that can’t be found on other forums. Let us know what you think!

Posted by Darren
Dec 07, 2009
(7) Comments

Topic: News

Introducing WPQuestions

WPQuestions has launched! The site is geared toward users who need quick, accurate answers to WordPress-related questions. The emphasis is on urgency, when you have a “WordPress emergency” that needs attention so you can launch your projects on schedule.

wpquestions

Users are either Askers, who offer money for emergency support, or Experts, who are established PHP coders looking to earn money and bolster credibility. Questions run in the form of a 3-day contest, but end as soon as the best answer is selected. (Read More ›)

What It Is

  1. A Time-Sensitive, Problem-Solving Environment.
    Users who cannot find timely, accurate help on the WordPress.org forums can post to WPQuestions knowing that experienced coders are waiting to help.
  2. Micro-Consultation.
    There are scenarios where novice developers and clients don’t wish to sign a 20-hour consulting contract with an expert. Instead they have bite-sized questions they need answered directly with minimal fuss.
  3. Convenient Revenue Stream.
    Every freelance developer understands the stop-start nature of workflow. In between projects, or on work days where client feedback is slow, WPQuestions is a great environment to make money and establish more credibility. The Top Experts page demonstrates to potential clients your coding talent and ability to problem-solve.

What It Isn’t

  1. Spec Work.
    Contest-based scenarios have been understandably criticized because they require hours of creative time with no guarantee of payment. WPQuestions is not for developers to dabble or waste their valuable time — it is for Experts who can glance a question and offer a solution without spending more than 10-20 minutes.
  2. A Substitute for WP Consultancy.
    WPQuestions is not meant to compete or cheapen the pricing of traditional 20-30hr contract-based consultancy arrangements. Instead, it is ideal for quick, one-off problems that need solutions. WPQuestions strives to value the time and skills of the Expert. If Experts can answer 5 questions in an hour at $20 (minimum) per question, they’ve earned $100+/hr. They are not bound to contracts or extended relationships with the Asker. They can pick and choose which questions are worth their time.
  3. A Discussion Site.
    Ideally, questions should have succinct answers without extended discussion. There maybe be multiple ways to write a PHP solution, but the Asker should choose whichever solutions was offered 1) first, and 2) most efficiently. WPQuestions does offer a prize-sharing option in scenarios where multiple Experts have contributed to the overall answer.

The Future

Our real priority is to get the site up and running and begin taking feedback and incorporating new features accordingly. The current branding and design will evolve once the audience needs become clearer. Our friend Adii is helping sponsor and market the site for the first couple months.

In the meantime, subscribe to the WPQuestions blog or contact us with any bugs or questions!

Posted by lawrence
Nov 26, 2009
(8) Comments

Topic: News

History, incubation and inspirations

Many times I have found myself needing to know about a technology with which I’ve had little experience. If I have time to spend learning something new, and if I think I’ll use the technology in the future, then I will enjoy learning about it in depth, but often times, working against a deadline, I have no time to learn, or perhaps I do not expect to ever use that technology again.

An example of the latter would be my limited experience with the Perl programming language. I recall when I was working for Danforth Diamond in 2005. I had to modify some of the old Perl scripts they had on their server. I spent a week working with Perl, and it was the only week that I have ever worked with Perl. I would have loved to have been able to quickly hire my own private consultant for all of maybe 20 minutes, to ask some basic questions about the language. As it was, I wasted days tracking down information via Google, and reading tutorials that did not quite answer the exact question that I had in my head.

My brain fought against me – it knew that I was not planning to work with Perl again, so it was resistant to learning it in the first place. I was stuck in a situation where I had to read through multiple articles about strings and escaping and how to handle variables inside of strings – many wasted hours. My life would have been much easier if I could have turned to someone who had a lot of experience with Perl, and handed them $20 for maybe 15 or 20 minutes of their time, to be allowed to fire away with questions like, “How do I put a variable in a heredoc string?” and gotten instant answers, answers that were tailored to me, answers that gave me exactly the information that I wanted, and nothing superfluous.

Hoping to get fast answers to my questions, I started posting on various forums. I have sometimes gotten fantastic assistance from various programmers on these forums. One of the greatest things about the Internet is how much people are generally willing to help one another for free. If you are trying to learn a programming language such as Java, it is surprising how helpful people will be on sites such as Java Ranch. And if you are trying to get answers to your questions about WordPress, it is wonderful how much good information you can get over at the WordPress forums.

And yet, over the years, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with free forums. I find it frustrating when I post a question that is altogether unique, but someone mistakes it for a common question, and so the only reply I get is “RTFM!!!!!” When people offer you free help, sometimes they are wonderful, but sometimes they attack you for aspects of your project that are beyond your control. For instance, I was once asked to fix a Javascript slideshow that depended on jQuery for funtionality, and when I posted some of the code to a forum, the only response I got was “Do not use jQuery!” But it was the lead programmer on that project who had decided to use jQuery, and I didn’t have the power to change that. I only had the power to fix the problem that I had been assigned.

We all seem a little stupid when we are learning a new skill. It doesn’t matter how smart we are. We ask what the experts think of as painfully dumb questions. Asking those dumb questions is essential to our learning process, but it is understandable that answering such questions may seem tiring to those who know a great deal about a given subject.

Hoping to get some high quality answers about Perl, I signed up for Experts Exchange. At the time it cost $9.99 a month (as I said, this was back in 2005). Nowadays it costs $12 a month. The fact that it costs money seems to introduce a level of seriousness to the conversations that is often absent on the free forums. And yet, Experts Exchange suffers a fatal flaw – none of the money goes to the people who answer the questions! The corporation, Experts Exchange, keeps all the money to itself! This limits the usefulness of the site. What I needed was an easy way to hire an expert for all of maybe 20 minutes, and give them some money, so they would take my dumb questions seriously.

Such experiences as that lead me to start imagining a site like the one we are now unveiling. Our hope is that this site will become the place where you know you can put up an appropriate amount of money and get the exact information that you need, with nothing superfluous.

We all need help sometimes. I can imagine a few common scenarios for using this site:

Perhaps you are a WordPress beginner, and you’ve got a bunch of questions that you urgently need answered, and you are not getting answers fast enough over on the free forums.

Or perhaps you are an experienced Web designer but you do not know how to read or write PHP code, and right now you’ve got a client demanding that you fix a PHP problem. All you need is to hire a PHP programmer for all of maybe 15 minutes so they can fix an easy problem in your code.

Or perhaps you are an experienced PHP programmer and you simply need an extra pair of eyes, to find the problem in a block of code that looks perfect to you. I have been in that situation many times. I recall I once wasted 30 minutes trying to fix a problem – I was getting a blank white screen in the browser, and no errors were reported in the PHP error log. I looked through all the code and it looked perfect to me. I could not see the problem. Finally I tracked the problem down to here:

for ($i=0; $i < count($arrayOfPosts); $i) {
$post = $arrayOfPosts[$i];
$stringOfTitles .= $post->post_title . "<br />";
}
echo $stringOfTitles;

Yes, the $i at the end of the for() statement needs to be $i++. As it was, I was facing an infinite loop.

Every programmer has occasionally run into a problem like that, where the code looks perfect, but it doesn’t behave perfect. We know we are missing something, and sometimes the wisest thing to do is simply ask someone else to look at it.

This site is here to help everyone who runs into these kinds of problems with their WordPress projects.

I think Darren’s experiences are different than mine, and he began to imagine a site such as this one simply because he is such a widely recognized WordPress expert that he gets bombarded with a lot of questions from people who are just learning the software. But I’ll leave it to him to write about his own train of thought.